Israeli military says Gaza hostage rescued in complex operation
Israeli troops have rescued a hostage in the southern Gaza Strip, the military said on Tuesday.
It said Qaid Farhan Alkadi was recovered in “a complex rescue operation” and said his medical condition was normal, Reuters reported.
Key events
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said that cyberspace needed to be regulated, citing the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Reuters reported.
“There need to be laws to regulate cyberspace. Everyone does it. Look at the French, they arrested this man and threatened him with 20 years in prison for breaching their laws,” Khamenei said.
Iran has some of the strictest internet controls in the world.
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.
Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.
Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.
Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children.
The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
Another strike late Monday hit a building in downtown Gaza City, killing a child, three women and a man, according to the Gaza Health ministry.
In southern Gaza, a strike on a home early Tuesday killed five people, including a man, his three children as young as 3 years old and a woman, according to a casualty list provided by Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies were taken.
Another airstrike early Tuesday flattened a home west of Khan Younis, killing at least four people, including a child, according to Nasser hospital, where the dead were taken. Footage shared online showed residents digging through the rubble. A man carried a wounded child to an ambulance, while two others carried a dead body wrapped in a blanket.
Palestinian health officials do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are civilians or fighters.
Daniel Levy The Biden administration remains in an intense phase of Middle East diplomatic activity working to avoid a regional war while optimistically spinning the prospects for a Gaza breakthrough deal.
Following the latest round of provocative Israeli extrajudicial killings in Tehran and Beirut and the intensified exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah over the weekend, the region appeared to lurch further in the direction of all-out war. Preventing that is a worthy cause in itself.
With a US election looming and policy on Gaza, Israel and the Middle East unpopular with the Democrats’ own constituency and a potential ballot box liability in key states, there are also pressing political reasons for a Democratic administration to avoid more war and to pursue a diplomatic breakthrough. Countering domestic political criticism with hope for a deal was a useful device to deploy at the Democratic convention in Chicago and will be needed through to 5 November.
Team Biden is attempting a difficult trifecta. First, the Biden administration is trying to deter the Iranian axis from further responses to Israel’s recent targeted killings in Tehran and Beirut. Joe Biden no doubt has wanted to hold out the prospect of a ceasefire, which Iran would prefer not to upend, whilst he simultaneously bought time for the US to beef up its military presence in the region as leverage and a threat against Iran.
The US is also trying to help a key regional ally, Israel, reclaim its deterrence posture and freedom of military operation after the balance of forces shifted against it during the current conflict.
Dahlia Scheindlin Hazlash is a funny-sounding Hebrew slang acronym. It means roughly “as you were”, or in a non-military idiom, “back to normal”. Within a few hours of Israel striking thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday, Israel’s wave of morning panic subsided and hazlash set in.
Back to normal wasn’t a given. As people woke up, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was issuing a set of civilian restrictions in preparation for escalation, and the defence minister declared a 48-hour state of emergency.
Beaches and certain public recreational activities were closed all the way from the town of Rishon LeZion, just south of Tel Aviv, to Israel’s northern border. Ominously, Ben Gurion airport shut down. But by 7am, the airport was open again. That’s a big sign of hazlash. In fact nothing is normal, and nothing is at all funny.
The most obvious non-normality is that Israel and Hezbollah are no further from the precipice of war than they were before 4.40am on Sunday morning. Before that, Israel claimed it had assassinated one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders in the heart of Beirut, generating weeks of fear in Israel over Hezbollah’s response (a near-simultaneous assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, presumed to be Israel’s work, prompted fear of an Iranian response as well).
Before that, Hezbollah fired rockets at the Golan Heights that slaughtered a dozen children and teens, all Druze. Before that, and before that … all the way back to the pre-dawn hours of 8 October, when Hezbollah struck Israel in a burst of enthusiasm for Hamas’s 7 October terror attack. The long-term hostilities of course go much further back, and they extend to the longstanding enmity between Iran and Israel.
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Julian Borger Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon.
Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
Israel’s airstrikes and Hezbollah’s rocket and drone launches that followed soon after was the biggest cross-border engagement since the two sides fought a war in 2006 in terms of the number of aircraft sorties and munitions launched, though not in terms of casualties. Three Hezbollah and allied fighters were killed and one Israeli sailor, killed by fragments of an Israeli interceptor.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, claimed the pre-emptive strikes on Sunday morning prevented Hezbollah from launching up to two-thirds of the rockets it had intended to fire at Israel. Israel also claimed to have shot down almost all the incoming Hezbollah drones.
Netanyahu issued a warning that the airstrikes would not be “the end of the story”, but reports in the Israeli press cited military sources as saying there was no planned follow-up.
Lisa O’Carroll The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised.
Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
“Refusals of food and slow authorisation of passage, meaning fresh food perishes, is unconscionable and shameful,” the taoiseach said in a statement issued in the last few minutes ahead of his trip to Paris.
“We now have a widespread catastrophic risk of polio and other horrific diseases because of ongoing cancellation of humanitarian aid. The UN has rushed more than 600,000 polio vaccines to Gaza and the fact that this life-saving chain would be disrupted with evacuation orders should not be contemplated,” he added.
He called on all sides to abide by the International Court of Justice order on unhindered access for huminatarian aid and said the latest “troubling” pattern of disruption had to be “called out”.
CQ Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel.
“And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
Iran has vowed a severe response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which took place as he visited Tehran late last month and which it blamed on Israel. Israel has neither confirmed or denied its involvement, Reuters reported.
Brown said the US military was better positioned to aid in the defence of Israel, and its own forces in the Middle East, than it was on 13 April, when Iran launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, unleashing hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
Still, Israel, the US and other allies managed to destroy almost all of the weapons before they reached their targets.
“We’re better postured,” Brown said. He noted Sunday’s decision to maintain two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Middle East, as well as extra squadron of F-22 fighter jets.
“We try to improve upon what we did in April.”
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 14 people, half of them children.
The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike.
Another strike late Monday hit a building in downtown Gaza City, killing a child, three women and a man, according to the Gaza health ministry, AP reported.
In southern Gaza, a strike on a home early Tuesday killed five people, including a man, his three children as young as 3 years old and a woman, according to a casualty list provided by Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies were taken.
Palestinian health officials do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are civilians or fighters.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said.
Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
It was one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of border warfare, but it also ended with limited damage in Israel and without immediate threats of more retaliation from either side, Reuters reported.
Brown noted Hezbollah’s strike was just one of two major threatened attacks against Israel that emerged in recent weeks. Iran is also threatening an attack over the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran last month.
Asked if the immediate risk of a regional war had declined, Brown said: “Somewhat, yes.”
“You had two things you knew were going to happen. One’s already happened. Now it depends on how the second is going to play out,” Brown said while flying out of Israel.
“How Iran responds will dictate how Israel responds, which will dictate whether there is going to be a broader conflict or not.”
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.
A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
According to the official, the UN had relocated most of its personnel in operations to Deir al-Balah following a Rafah evacuation order several months ago.
The Israeli military said on Monday it was targeting “terror operatives” in Deir al-Balah and working to dismantle the remaining “infrastructure” of Hamas, whose 7 October attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. The Israeli military has told people to evacuate immediately.
According to the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA), 15 premises hosting aid workers and four warehouses either in or near the area ordered to evacuate were affected.
After it appeared that the UN had shut down its Gaza operations, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for secretary-general António Guterres, clarified that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was continuing operations, although under restrictions.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news:
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.
Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.
Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.
Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.
The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister’s death to be prosecuted and punished. Frankcom, a 43-year-old from Melbourne who was working in Gaza with World Central Kitchen, was one of seven people killed in April when a convoy of cars was hit by an Israeli airstrike. Israel’s defence force conducted an investigation into the incident, which resulted in two officers being dismissed and three others being reprimanded. Mal Frankcom told the ABC he did not feel this was an adequate response.
The day so far
Israeli strikes across Gaza kill 14, including children, Palestinians say
UN says aid work in Gaza disrupted after Israel orders evacuation of Deir al-Balah area
