Hamas to stay out of Gaza truce talks but may meet mediators afterwards

Update Hamas to stay out of Gaza truce talks but may meet mediators afterwards
An injured Palestinian man is rushed to the Nasser hospital following Israeli bombardment on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on August 14, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 14 August 2024
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Hamas to stay out of Gaza truce talks but may meet mediators afterwards

Hamas to stay out of Gaza truce talks but may meet mediators afterwards
  • The US has said it expects indirect talks to go ahead as planned in Qatar’s capital Doha on Thursday
  • Hamas has voiced skepticism about the talks, accusing Israel of stalling

CAIRO: Hamas said on Wednesday it would not take part in a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks slated for Thursday in Qatar, but an official briefed on the talks said mediators expected to consult with the Palestinian group afterwards.
The US has said it expects indirect talks to go ahead as planned in Qatar’s capital Doha on Thursday, and that a ceasefire agreement was still possible, while warning that progress was needed urgently to avert a wider war.
Axios reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed a trip to the Middle East that had been expected to begin on Tuesday. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that CIA Director Bill Burns and US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk will represent Washington at the talks on Thursday in Qatar.
Three senior Iranian officials have said that only a ceasefire deal in Gaza would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on its soil last month.
“Israel will send the negotiations team on the agreed upon date, that’s tomorrow Aug. 15th, in order to finalize the details of the implementation of the framework agreement,” government spokesperson David Mencer said in a briefing.
The delegation includes Israel’s spy chief David Barnea, head of the domestic security service Ronen Bar and the military’s hostages chief Nitzan Alon, a defense official said.
Hamas has voiced skepticism about the talks, accusing Israel of stalling. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been the main obstacle to a deal.
“Going to new negotiations allows the occupation to impose new conditions and employ the maze of negotiation to conduct more massacres,” Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Hamas’ absence from the talks does not eliminate chances of progress since its chief negotiator Khalil Al-Hayya is based in Doha and the group has open channels with Egypt and Qatar.
“Hamas is committed to the proposal presented to it on July 2, which is based on the UN Security Council resolution and the Biden speech and the movement is prepared to immediately begin discussion over a mechanism to implement it,” said Abu Zuhri.
A source familiar with the matter said Hamas wants the mediators to come back with a “serious response” from Israel. If that happens, the group says, it will meet with mediators after the Thursday session. An official briefed on the talks process said mediators expected to consult with Hamas.
In a statement Hamas issued late on Wednesday jointly with some smaller factions, it reaffirmed the outstanding demands the factions wanted a ceasefire agreement to achieve.
The group said negotiations “should examine mechanisms to implement what was agreed upon in the framework deal submitted by mediators that would achieve a comprehensive ceasefire, a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces, breaking the siege, opening crossings and reconstruction of Gaza as well as reaching a serious hostages/prisoners deal.”
The statement rejected any US or Israeli intervention in shaping the day after the war in Gaza.


Netanyahu to delay departure for US due to security situation in north: Israeli official

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Netanyahu to delay departure for US due to security situation in north: Israeli official

Netanyahu to delay departure for US due to security situation in north: Israeli official
Netanyahu delayed his visit to the US by one day
During his visit to the United States, Netanyahu will address the annual UN General Assembly session

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will delay his departure to New York by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north, an official in his office told AFP on Friday.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delayed his visit to the US by one day in light of the security situation in the north of Israel,” the official said, asking not to be named. He said that Netanyahu will now travel on September 25, instead of September 24 as previously planned.
During his visit to the United States, Netanyahu will address the annual UN General Assembly session. He is scheduled to return to Israel on September 28.
Israel is engaged in fierce cross-border clash in the country’s north with the Lebanese Hezbollah group, with the situation deteriorating in recent days.
On Friday, the Israeli military carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut, which a source close to Hezbollah said killed one of its top military leaders.

Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof

Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof
Updated 32 min 27 sec ago
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Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof

Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof
  • The videos showed three soldiers on the roof of a building in the town of Qabatiya, dragging, pushing, throwing and in one case kicking what appear to be dead men off the edge
  • Zakaria Zakarneh, the uncle of one of the men, said he saw what had happened

QABATIYA, West Bank: The Israeli military said on Friday it had opened an investigation after videos showed soldiers pushing what appear to be dead bodies off a roof in the occupied West Bank during a raid against Palestinian militants.
The videos, which began circulating online on Thursday, showed three soldiers on the roof of a building in the town of Qabatiya, dragging, pushing, throwing and in one case kicking what appear to be dead men off the edge.
Zakaria Zakarneh, the uncle of one of the men, said he saw what had happened. Israeli soldiers had gone to the roof after the Palestinians were killed, he told Reuters.
“They tried to move the bodies down with a bulldozer but it didn’t work so they threw them from the second floor down to the ground,” he said. “I was in pain, very sad and angry I was unable to do anything,” Zakarneh said.
Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video as Qabatiya and confirm the date from eyewitness accounts and video filmed by local Palestinian news organizations showing the same scene.
The Israeli military said in a statement the incident was serious and was not in keeping with its values.
In a separate statement, it said that on Thursday its soldiers had killed seven militants in gunbattles and an airstrike in Qabatiya.
Violence has surged in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, with almost daily sweeps by Israeli forces that have involved thousands of arrests and regular gunbattles between security forces and Palestinian fighters, as well as attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian communities.


Ukraine joins NATO drill to test anti-drone systems

Ukraine joins NATO drill to test anti-drone systems
Updated 44 min 58 sec ago
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Ukraine joins NATO drill to test anti-drone systems

Ukraine joins NATO drill to test anti-drone systems
  • The drills at a Dutch military base tested cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones and assessed how they work together
  • The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones in a week when their critical role in the Ukraine war was demonstrated once again

VREDEPEEL, Netherlands: NATO concluded a major anti-drone exercise this week, with Ukraine taking part for the first time as the Western alliance seeks to learn urgently from the rapid development and widespread use of unmanned systems in the war there.
The drills at a Dutch military base, involving more than 20 countries and some 50 companies, tested cutting-edge systems to detect and counter drones and assessed how they work together.
The 11-day exercise ended with a demonstration of jamming and hacking drones in a week when their critical role in the Ukraine war was demonstrated once again.
On Wednesday, a large Ukrainian drone attack triggered an earthquake-sized blast at a major Russian arsenal. The following day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was ramping up drone production tenfold to nearly 1.4 million this year.
The proliferation of drones in the war – to destroy targets and survey the battlefield – has prompted NATO to increase its focus on the threat they could pose to the alliance.
“NATO takes this threat very, very seriously,” said Matt Roper, chief of the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at the alliance’s technology agency.
“This is not a domain we can afford to sit back and be passive on,” he said at the exercise site, Lt. Gen. Best Barracks in the east of The Netherlands.
Experts have warned NATO that it needs to catch up quickly on drone warfare.
“NATO has too few drones for a high-intensity fight against a peer adversary,” a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank declared last September.
“It would be severely challenged to effectively integrate those it has in a contested environment.”

THREAT EVOLUTION
The drills that wrapped up on Thursday — complete with ice cream for onlookers provided by a radar company — were the fourth annual iteration of the exercise.
Claudio Palestini, the co-chair of a NATO working group on unmanned systems, said the exercise had adapted to trends such as the transformation of FPV (first-person view) drones — originally designed for civilian racers – into deadly weapons.
“Every year, we see an evolution of the threat with the introduction of new technology,” he said. “But also we see a lot of capabilities (to counter drones) that are becoming more mature.”
In a demonstration on Thursday, two small FPV drones whizzed and whined at high speed through the blue sky to dart around a military all-terrain vehicle before their signal was jammed.
Such electronic warfare is widespread in Ukraine. But it is less effective against long-range reconnaissance drones, a technology developer at Ukraine’s defense ministry said.
The official, giving only his first name of Yaroslav for security reasons, said his team had developed kamikaze drones to destroy such craft – a much cheaper option than firing missiles, which Ukraine had previously done.
“You need to run fast,” he said of the race to counter the impact of drones. “Technology which you develop is there for three months, maybe six months. After, it’s obsolete.”


Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut

Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut
Updated 11 min 29 sec ago
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Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut

Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut
  • A total of three people were killed and 17 wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said
  • The air strike is the third to hit the southern suburbs of Beirut since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7

BEIRUT: A source close to Hezbollah in Lebanon said an Israel air strike Friday killed one of its top military leaders, with Israel confirming it had carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut.
Requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, the source said the Israeli strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Beirut killed the head of the group’s elite Radwan unit, Ibrahim Aqil.
A total of three people were killed and 17 wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
Israel said it had conducted a “targeted strike” in Beirut, where a security official said an air strike had hit Hezbollah’s stronghold in the south of the city.
The air strike is the third to hit the southern suburbs of Beirut since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, with the focus of the violence shifting dramatically this week from Gaza to Lebanon.
Strikes blamed on Israel killed a top commander of Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, in July, and a leader of allied Palestinian militant group Hamas, Saleh Al-Aruri, in January.

Earlier Friday, Israel said Hezbollah had fired dozens of rockets from Lebanon following air strikes which destroyed dozens of the militant group’s launchers.
On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed retribution for deadly sabotage attacks on its communications that he blamed on Israel.
Israel has not commented on the communications device explosions, but the intensifying violence comes after it announced it was shifting its war objectives to its northern border with Lebanon.
For nearly a year, Israeli firepower has focused on Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, but its troops have also been engaged in near-daily exchanges with Hezbollah.
The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios, which killed 37 people and wounded thousands over two days.
Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rockets after overnight bombardment people in south Lebanon described as among the fiercest so far.
“Some 140 rockets were fired from Lebanon within an hour,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
The military said that overnight its jets hit infrastructure and “approximately 100 launchers” ready to be fired.
Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed, without elaborating.
Residents of Marjayoun, a Lebanese town close to the border, said the overnight bombardment was among the heaviest since the border exchanges began last October.
“We were very scared, especially for my grandchildren,” said Nuha Abdo, 62. “We were moving them from one room to another.”
Clothing store owner Elie Rmeih, 45, counted more than 50 strikes.
“It was a terrifying scene and unlike anything we have experienced since the escalation began.
“We live in fear of a wider war, you don’t know where to go.”
International mediators have repeatedly tried to avert a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah and staunch the regional fallout of the Gaza war started by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Speaking for the first time since the device blasts, Nasrallah warned Israel would face retribution for the communications device blasts.
Describing the attacks as a “massacre” and a possible “act of war,” Nasrallah said Israel would face “just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not.”
Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon, mostly fighters, and dozens in Israel.
Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have fled their homes.
Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Hezbollah will pay an increasing price” as Israel tries to “ensure the safe return” of its citizens to border areas.
“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” he said.
Senior UN officials have expressed concern about the legality of the sabotage of Hezbollah’s communication devices.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called the blasts “shocking,” and said their impact on civilians was “unacceptable.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been scrambling to salvage efforts for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal, called for restraint on all sides.
“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would endanger the goal of a Gaza ceasefire, he said.
Hamas’s October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Out of 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.
In the latest Gaza violence, the territory’s civil defense agency said an air strike on a house in Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people. Another six people, including children, were killed in a separate strike on an apartment in Gaza City, it added.
The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation found the pagers that exploded had been booby-trapped, a security official said.
Lebanon’s UN mission concurred, saying in a letter that the probe showed “the targeted devices were professionally booby-trapped... before arriving in Lebanon, and were detonated by sending emails to the devices.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the pagers that exploded were produced by the Hungary-based BAC Consulting on behalf of Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. It cited intelligence officers as saying BAC was part of an Israeli front.
A government spokesman in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary.”


Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus

Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus
Updated 20 September 2024
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Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus

Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus
  • A fighter got killed in the “Zionist attack”

DUBAI: Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah armed group announced that one of its fighters was killed in what they called a “Zionist attack” in the Syrian capital Damascus, the group said in a statement on Telegram on Friday.