Egypt warned Israel three days before Hamas attack: senior US lawmaker

Egypt warned Israel three days before Hamas attack: senior US lawmaker
Israel got a warning from Egypt of potential violence three days before Hamas caught Israeli forces off-guard in a large-scale attack, the chairman of the powerful US House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul said Wednesday.(AFP)
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Updated 11 October 2023
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Egypt warned Israel three days before Hamas attack: senior US lawmaker

Egypt warned Israel three days before Hamas attack: senior US lawmaker
  • “We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” Republican Michael McCaul told reporters
  • Israel is reeling from the deadliest attack in its 75-year history

WASHINGTON: Israel got a warning from Egypt of potential violence three days before Hamas caught Israeli forces off-guard in a large-scale attack, the chairman of the powerful US House Foreign Affairs Committee said Wednesday.
“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” Republican Michael McCaul told reporters following a closed-door intelligence briefing for lawmakers on the crisis.
“I don’t want to get too much into classified, but a warning was given,” he said. “I think the question was at what level.”
Israel is reeling from the deadliest attack in its 75-year history, as more than 1,500 militants stormed through the Gaza security barrier in their coordinated land, air and sea attack on the Jewish Sabbath.
The US ally says Hamas gunmen killed more than 1,200 people and wounded over 2,700 as they swept into small towns and kibbutzim and indiscriminately killed residents who hid in their homes or died defending their communities.
Israel has been relentlessly pounding Hamas targets in Gaza in response, and the war has already claimed the lives of more than 3,700 lives of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, soldiers and combatants.
In Washington, President Joe Biden has pledged to send more US munitions and military hardware and expressed revulsion at the “sheer evil” of the slaughter of civilians.
McCaul said the attack may have been planned as long as a year ago.
“We’re not quite sure how we missed it. We’re not quite sure how Israel missed it,” he told reporters.


Several injured in suspected shooting attack in southern Israel, police say

Several injured in suspected shooting attack in southern Israel, police say
Updated 6 sec ago
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Several injured in suspected shooting attack in southern Israel, police say

Several injured in suspected shooting attack in southern Israel, police say
JERUSALEM: Israeli police said on Sunday several people had been injured in a suspected shooting attack in the city of Beersheba in the country’s south, while the ambulance service said the attacker had been killed.
The ambulance service said a seriously injured woman was being treated at the scene while eight other people injured in the attack, including one in a moderate to serious condition, were receiving medical treatment in a nearby hospital.

Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon
Updated 06 October 2024
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Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Desperate deja vu for foreign war doctors in Lebanon

Beirut: In a south Lebanon hospital, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert peered out of the window after bombardment near the Israeli border, four decades after he first worked in the country.
“It’s a horrible experience,” he said in a video call from the southern town of Nabatiyeh.
“It’s been 42 years and nothing has changed,” said Gilbert, who first saw war treating patients during the 1982 Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut.
Below the window paramedics were on standby next to parked ambulances at the hospital behind the front line.
The anaesthetist and emergency medicine specialist said he had seen just a few cases since arriving on Tuesday.
“Most of the cases have been south of us and they have not been able to evacuate them because the attacks have been so vicious,” Gilbert said.
Israel has increased its air strikes against Lebanese militant group Hezbollah since September 23, pounding the south of the country and later staging what it called “limited operations” across the border.
On Thursday the Israeli army warned residents to leave Nabatiyeh.
The escalation has killed more than 1,100 people and wounded at least another 3,600, and pushed upwards of a million people to flee their homes, according to government figures.
Official media have reported some Israeli strikes killing entire families, and AFP has spoken to two people who lost 17 relatives and 10 family members respectively.
Israel’s military “can do whatever they want to health care, to ambulances, to churches, to mosques, to universities, as they’ve been doing in Gaza,” said Gilbert, who has repeatedly volunteered in the Palestinian territory during past conflicts.
“And now we see the same repeat itself in Lebanon in 2024.”
A hospital in the town of Bint Jbeil closer to the border on Saturday said it was hit by heavy overnight Israeli strikes, wounding nine medical and nursing staff, most seriously.
At least four hospitals said they had suspended work amid ongoing Israeli bombardment on Friday, and Hezbollah-affiliated paramedics said 11 personnel were killed in Israeli raids in south Lebanon.
On Thursday, Lebanon’s health minister said more than 40 paramedics and firefighters had been killed by Israeli fire in three days.
UN official Imran Riza on X on Saturday spoke of “an alarming increase in attacks against health care in Lebanon.”
Britain said reports that Israeli strikes had hit “health facilities and support personnel” in Lebanon were “deeply disturbing.”
Israel has claimed Hezbollah uses ambulances for “terrorist purposes.”
In the capital Beirut, British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah said he also saw parallels with the conflict in Gaza.
Abu-Sittah has tirelessly campaigned for “justice” since spending weeks in the besieged Palestinian territory treating the wounded at the start of the war.
Now in Lebanon, the plastic and reconstructive surgeon described seeing “kids, families whose houses have been targeted” with blast injuries in the past few weeks.
There were “kids with blast injuries to the face, to the torso, amputated limbs,” he said outside the American University of Beirut’s Medical Center.
Abu-Sittah estimated that more than a quarter of the wounded he had seen in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon were minors.
“I have a girl upstairs who is 13, who had a blast injury to the face, needed reconstruction of her jaw, will need several surgeries,” he said.
“Children who are injured in war need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re adult age.”
According to the UN children’s agency UNICEF, 690 children in Lebanon have been wounded in recent weeks.
It said doctors had reported most suffered from “concussions and traumatic brain injuries from the impact of blasts, shrapnel wounds and limb injuries.”
“It’s just so reminiscent of what was happening in Gaza,” said Abu-Sittah.
“The heartbreaking thing is that this could all have been stopped if they stopped the war in Gaza,” he added.


Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far

Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far
Updated 14 min 27 sec ago
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Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far

Israeli strikes batter Beirut in heaviest bombardment so far
  • Heavy strikes shake southern Beirut
  • Israel says it made ‘targeted strikes’ on Hezbollah storage facilities, infrastructure

BEIRUT: Israeli air attacks battered Beirut’s southern suburbs overnight and early on Sunday, the most intense bombardment of the Lebanese capital since Israel sharply escalated its campaign against Iran-backed group Hezbollah last month.
During the night, the blasts sent booms across Beirut and sparked flashes of red and white for nearly 30 minutes visible from several kilometers away.
It was the single biggest attack of Israel’s assault on Beirut so far, witnesses and military analysts on local TV channels said.
On Sunday a grey haze hung over the city and rubble was strewn across streets in the southern suburbs, while smoke columns rose over the area.
“Last night was the most violence of all the previous nights. Buildings were shaking around us and at first I thought it was an earthquake. There were dozens of strikes — we couldn’t count them all — and the sounds were deafening,” said Hanan Abdullah, a resident of the Burj Al-Barajneh area in Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Videos posted on social media, which Reuters could not immediately verify, showed fresh damage to the highway that runs from Beirut airport through its southern suburbs into downtown.
Israel said its air force had “conducted a series of targeted strikes on a number of weapons storage facilities and terrorist infrastructure sites belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization in the area of Beirut.”
Lebanese authorities did not immediately say what the missiles had hit or what damage they caused.
This weekend’s intense bombardment came just ahead of the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli figures.
The target of Israel’s airstrikes across Lebanon and its ground invasion in the south of the country is the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, Iran’s chief ally in the region. The assault has killed hundreds of people including civilians and has displaced 1.2 million, Lebanese officials say.
For days Israel has bombed the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh — considered a stronghold for Hezbollah but also home to thousands of ordinary Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian refugees — killing its leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Sept. 27.
A Lebanese security source said on Saturday that Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s potential successor, had been out of contact since Friday, after an Israeli airstrike on Thursday near the city’s international airport that was reported to have targeted him.
Israel continues to bomb the area of the strike, preventing rescue workers from reaching it, Lebanese security sources said.
Hezbollah has not commented on Safieddine.
His loss would be another blow to the group and its patron Iran. Israeli strikes across the region in the past year, sharply accelerated in recent weeks, have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership.

Gaza war
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after the Oct. 7 attacks and aimed at eliminating Hamas, another Iran-backed group, has killed nearly 42,000 people, Palestinian authorities say. The coastal enclave lies in ruins.
At least 26 people were killed and 93 others wounded when Israeli airstrikes hit a mosque and a school sheltering displaced people in the Gaza Strip early on Sunday, the Hamas-run Gaza government media office said.
Hezbollah began firing rockets at Israel a day after the Oct. 7 attacks and after Israel had begun bombing Gaza, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinian group.
Cross-border fire continued between Israel and Hezbollah for months, but were mostly limited to the Israel-Lebanon border area before the recent upsurge.
Israel says it stepped up its assault on Hezbollah last month to enable the safe return of tens of thousands of citizens to homes in northern Israel, bombarded by the group since last Oct. 8.
Israeli authorities said on Saturday that nine Israeli soldiers had been killed in southern Lebanon so far.
In northern Israel, air raid sirens sounded on Sunday and the Israeli military said it had intercepted rockets fired from Lebanese territory.
Iran has signalled it does not want a direct war with Israel but has launched responses on occasion to Israeli attacks. It fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday that did little damage.
Israel has been weighing options for its response.


Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears
Updated 06 October 2024
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Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

Iran’s oil minister visits key oil terminal amid Israel strike fears

TEHRAN: Iran’s Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad landed on Kharg island, the oil ministry’s news website Shana reported on Sunday, amid concerns that Israel could target Iran’s largest oil terminal there.
An Israeli military spokesman said on Saturday that Israel would retaliate, following last week’s missile attack by Tehran, “when the time is right.”
Following Iran’s attack, Axios cited Israeli officials as saying that Iran’s oil facilities could be hit in response. US President Joe Biden said on Friday that he did not think Israel had yet concluded how to respond.
“Paknejad arrived this morning in order to visit the oil facilities and meet operational staff located on Kharg island,” Shana reported, adding that the oil terminal there has the capacity to store 23 million barrels of crude.
China, which does not recognize US sanctions, is Tehran’s main client and according to analysts imported 1.2 to 1.4 million barrels per day from Iran in the first half of 2024.


Israel army says more troops deployed near Gaza ahead of October 7 anniversary

Israel army says more troops deployed near Gaza ahead of October 7 anniversary
Updated 06 October 2024
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Israel army says more troops deployed near Gaza ahead of October 7 anniversary

Israel army says more troops deployed near Gaza ahead of October 7 anniversary
  • Israel army encircles Gaza’s Jabaliya as Hamas rebuilds

GAZA: The Israeli military said Sunday it deployed more troops to defend southern communities and areas bordering Gaza, ahead of the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas.
“The IDF’s (army) Gaza Division has been reinforced with several platoons, with forces stationed to defend both the communities and the border area,” the military said.
“The soldiers are fully equipped to defend the region in coordination with local security forces,” it said in a statement.
Inside Gaza, the military said three divisions were working to “dismantle terrorist infrastructure and degrade Hamas’s capabilities.”
“The Southern Command remains at a heightened state of vigilance and readiness for the coming days,” commanding officer Major General Yaron Finkelman was quoted as saying.
Earlier, the military said its forces had surrounded the area of Jabaliya in central Gaza where Hamas was trying to rebuild its operational capabilities.

“The troops of the 401st Brigade and the 460th Brigade have successfully encircled the area and are currently continuing to operate in the area,” the military said in a statement on Sunday.
It cited intelligence suggesting the “presence of terrorists and terror infrastructure in the area of Jabaliya... as well as efforts by Hamas to rebuild its operational capabilities in the area.”
“Prior to and during the operation, the IAF (air force) struck dozens of military targets in the area to assist IDF (army) ground troops,” the military said, adding that targets hit were weapons storage facilities, underground infrastructure sites and other militant sites.
Hamas-run Gaza’s civil defense spokesman Mahmud Bassal said multiple strikes rocked Jabaliya overnight, with many casualties.
Residents said the Israeli military had targeted the area with heavy bombardments.
“The shelling is random and violent in multiple directions and we do not know where the shelling is coming from and we do not know where to go,” Gaza resident Jameel Al Habibi told AFP.
Israeli forces have regularly targeted Jabaliya since the Gaza war began, displacing most residents.
The military said it was also expanding the humanitarian area in Al-Mawasi along the coastline in southern Gaza.
“For this purpose, two humanitarian evacuation routes from northern Gaza have been reopened: one along the Salaheddine road and the other along the Al-Rashid coastal road,” the military said.
Gaza’s civil defense agency meanwhile said an Israeli air strike on a mosque-turned-shelter on Sunday in central Deir Al-Balah killed 26 people. Israel’s military said it had targeted Hamas militants.
“The number of martyrs brought to hospitals as a result of the occupation’s targeting of displaced people in the Ibn Rushd school and Al Aqsa Martyrs mosque reached 26, with several more wounded,” a health ministry statement said.
Israel’s military said it had “conducted a precise strike on Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control center” at the mosque.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
The militants also seized 251 hostages, 97 of whom are still held captive in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel launched a blistering military campaign in Gaza, vowing to destroy Hamas and bring back the hostages.
At least 41,825 people have been killed in Gaza, the majority of them civilians, the territory’s health ministry said Sunday.
The UN has acknowledged the figures to be reliable.