Hezbollah faces long recovery, officials believe thousands of fighters killed

Hezbollah faces long recovery, officials believe thousands of fighters killed
With the bodies of its fighters still strewn on the battlefield, Hezbollah must bury its dead and provide succour to its supporters who bore the brunt of Israel's offensive, as the first steps on a long and costly road to recovery, four senior officials said. (Reuters/File)
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Updated 27 November 2024
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Hezbollah faces long recovery, officials believe thousands of fighters killed

Hezbollah faces long recovery, officials believe thousands of fighters killed
  • One source said the Iran-backed group may have lost up to 4,000 people
  • Hassan Fadallah, a senior Hezbollah politician, told Reuters the priority will be “the people”

BEIRUT: With the bodies of its fighters still strewn on the battlefield, Hezbollah must bury its dead and provide succour to its supporters who bore the brunt of Israel’s offensive, as the first steps on a long and costly road to recovery, four senior officials said.
Hezbollah believes the number of its fighters killed during 14 months of hostilities could reach several thousand, with the vast majority killed since Israel went on the offensive in September, three sources familiar with its operations say, citing previously unreported internal estimates.
One source said the Iran-backed group may have lost up to 4,000 people — well over 10 times the number killed in its month-long 2006 war with Israel. So far, Lebanese authorities have said some 3,800 people were killed in the current hostilities, without distinguishing fighters from civilians.
Hezbollah emerges shaken from top to bottom, its leadership still reeling from the killing of its former leader Hassan Nasrallah and its supporters made homeless en masse by the carpet bombing of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the destruction of entire villages in the south.
With a ceasefire taking hold on Wednesday, Hezbollah’s agenda includes working to re-establish its organizational structure fully, probing security breaches that helped Israel land so many painful blows, and a full review of the last year including its mistakes in underestimating Israel’s technological capabilities, three other sources familiar with the group’s thinking said.
For this story Reuters spoke to a dozen people who together provided details of some of the challenges facing Hezbollah as it seeks to pick itself up after the war. Most asked not to be named to speak about sensitive matters.
Hassan Fadallah, a senior Hezbollah politician, told Reuters the priority will be “the people.”
“To shelter them, to remove the rubble, to bid farewell to the martyrs and, in the next phase, to rebuild,” he said.
Israel’s campaign has focused largely on Hezbollah’s Shiite Muslim heartlands, where its supporters were badly hit. They include people still nursing casualties from Israel’s attack on its mobile communications devices in September.
“I have a brother who was martyred, a brother-in-law who was wounded in the pager attacks, and my neighbors and relatives are all either martyrs, wounded or missing,” said Hawraa, a woman from south Lebanon with family members who fight for Hezbollah.
“We want to collect our martyrs and bury them ... we want to rebuild our homes,” said Hawraa, who stayed in her village until she was forced to flee by the Israeli assault in September. She declined to use her full name, citing safety fears. The Israeli offensive displaced more than 1 million people, the bulk of them from areas where Hezbollah has sway.
A senior Lebanese official familiar with Hezbollah thinking said the group’s focus would be squarely on securing their return and rebuilding their homes: “Hezbollah is like a wounded man. Does a wounded man get up and fight? A wounded man needs to tend to his wounds.”
The official expected Hezbollah to carry out a wide-ranging policy review after the war, dealing with all major issues: Israel, its weapons, and the internal politics of Lebanon, where its weapons have long been a point of conflict. Iran, which established Hezbollah in 1982, has promised to help with reconstruction. The costs are immense: The World Bank estimates $2.8 billion in damage to housing alone in Lebanon, with 99,000 homes partially or fully destroyed.
The senior Lebanese official said Tehran has a variety of ways to get funds to Hezbollah, without giving details.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, a close Hezbollah ally, is urging wealthy Lebanese Shiites in the diaspora to send funds to help the displaced, two Lebanese officials said.
The officials also expected significant donations to come from Shiite religious foundations across the region.
Hezbollah did not immediately respond to a detailed request for comment for this story. Iran’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

’THE RESISTANCE’ WILL CONTINUE Hezbollah has indicated it intends to keep its arms, dashing hopes of Lebanese adversaries who predicted the pressures generated by the war would finally lead it to hand them to the state. Hezbollah officials have said the resistance — widely understood to mean its armed status — will continue.
Hezbollah opened fire in support of Palestinian ally Hamas on Oct. 8, 2023. Israel went on the offensive against the group in September, declaring the aim of securing the return home of 60,000 people evacuated from homes in the north.
Despite the resulting devastation, Hezbollah’s Fadlallah said the resistance put up by its fighters in south Lebanon and the group’s intensified rocket salvoes toward the end of the conflict showed Israel had failed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says its campaign has set back Hezbollah decades, eliminated its top leaders, destroyed most of its rockets, neutralized thousands of fighters, and obliterated its infrastructure near the border. A senior US official said Hezbollah was “extremely weak” at this moment, both militarily and politically. A Western diplomat echoed that assessment, saying Israel had the upper hand and had almost dictated the terms of its withdrawal. The ceasefire terms agreed by Israel and Lebanon require Hezbollah to have no military presence in an area between the Israeli border and the Litani River, which meets the Mediterranean Sea some 30 km (20 miles) from the frontier.
Hezbollah, which approved the deal, has not declared how it intends to help implement those terms, including whether it actively hands its arms to Lebanese troops who are deploying into the south, or leaves the weapons for soldiers to find.
Israel complains Hezbollah, which is deeply rooted in south Lebanon, never implemented the same terms when they were agreed to end a previous war in 2006 war. Israel says the group was preparing for a large-scale assault into northern Israel, pointing to its military build-up at the frontier.
Andreas Krieg of King’s College in London said Hezbollah had retained considerable capability.
The performance of its “core infantry fighters in southern Lebanon and rocket attacks deep into Israeli territory in recent days showed the group was still very, very capable,” he said.
“But Hezbollah will be very much bogged down in the effort of rebuilding the infrastructure and also, most importantly, securing the funds to do so,” he said.

’REPAYING THE DEBT’
Hezbollah has been handing out cash to people affected by the hostilities since they began, paying $200 a month to civilians who stayed in frontline villages, and offering more as people were forced to flee the areas, according to recipients.
Since the start of the escalation in September, Hezbollah has been paying around $300 a month to help displaced families.
The group has made no secret of the military and financial support it gets from Iran, which shipped huge sums of cash to in 2006 to aid the homeless and help rebuild.
Hezbollah supporters say more will be on the way. One, citing conversations with a local Hezbollah official, said the group would cover a year of rent for the homeless in addition to furniture costs.
Addressing the Lebanese people in an October sermon, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said “the destruction will be replaced... repaying the debt to the wounded, bleeding Lebanon is our duty....”
The World Bank, in a preliminary estimate, put the cost in damage and losses to Lebanon at $8.5 billion, a bill that cannot be footed by the government, still suffering the consequences of a catastrophic financial collapse five years ago.
Gulf states Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia helped pay the $5 billion reconstruction bill in 2006, the last time Hezbollah and Israel went to war. But there has been no sign that these Sunni-led Arab states are ready to do so again. Hezbollah conducted a lot of reconstruction work after the 2006 war, financed by Iran and using its construction wing. The project was directed by Hashem Safieddine, a Hezbollah leader killed by Israel 11 days after Nasrallah, in a sign of the bigger challenges it will face this time round.
“For Hezbollah the priority is to guarantee the loyalty of the Shi’ite community. The destruction has been enormous and it will impact the organization,” said Mohanand Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Center.


Amnesty says Israel carrying out ‘genocide’ in Gaza

Amnesty says Israel carrying out ‘genocide’ in Gaza
Updated 05 December 2024
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Amnesty says Israel carrying out ‘genocide’ in Gaza

Amnesty says Israel carrying out ‘genocide’ in Gaza

THE HAGUE: Amnesty International on Thursday accused Israel of “committing genocide” against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war last year, saying a new report was a “wake-up call” for the international community.
The London-based rights organization said its findings were based on “dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials,” satellite images documenting devastation, fieldwork and ground reports from Gazans.
“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” Amnesty chief Agnes Callamard said in a statement.
“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,” she added.
The Palestinian group Hamas launched an unprecedented attack inside southern Israel on October 7, 2023, triggering a deadly Israeli military offensive as Israeli officials vowed to crush the militants.
Israel has repeatedly and forcefully denied allegations of genocide, accusing Hamas of using the Palestinian people as human shields.
“There is absolutely no doubt that Israel has military objectives. But the existence of military objectives does not negate the possibility of a genocidal intent,” Callamard told AFP at a press conference in The Hague.
The 300-page report points to incidents where there “was no Hamas presence or any other military objectives.”
It cites 15 air strikes in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and April 20, which killed 334 civilians including 141 children, for which the group found “no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective.”
In addition to tens of thousands of deaths and physical and psychological trauma, the report also points to the conditions on the ground, where it said Palestinians are subjected to “malnutrition, hunger and diseases” and exposed to a “slow, calculated death.”
“States that transfer arms to Israel violate their obligations to prevent genocide under the convention and are at risk of becoming complicit,” Callamard added during the press conference.
Since the start of the war, at least 44,532 people have been killed in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, deemed reliable by the UN.
Amnesty International has also announced that it will publish a report on the crimes committed by Hamas during the October 7 attack, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures, which includes hostages killed in captivity.
Hamas also seized 251 hostages during the attack, some of whom were already dead. Of those, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 35 the Israeli army says are dead.


Palestinians accuse Israeli forces of raiding West Bank hospital

Palestinians accuse Israeli forces of raiding West Bank hospital
Updated 05 December 2024
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Palestinians accuse Israeli forces of raiding West Bank hospital

Palestinians accuse Israeli forces of raiding West Bank hospital
  • Israeli authorities confirmed the raid in which they apprehended a Palestinian injured in an Israeli strike
  • Israelis accuse him of being ‘the third member of a terrorist cell that carried out a shooting’ at Mehola junction

NABLUS, Palestinian Territories: The Palestinian health ministry in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday condemned a raid by Israeli forces on a hospital in Nablus and the arrest of an injured patient.
Israeli authorities confirmed the raid on Wednesday evening in which they apprehended a Palestinian injured in an Israeli strike the day before.
The health ministry in a statement called the raid “a flagrant violation of all international laws and conventions that stipulate the protection of treatment centers and patients.”
The detained Palestinian is from near Tubas in the northern West Bank, where he was targeted in an Israeli strike on Tuesday that the Israeli military said killed three other Palestinians.
Medical sources confirmed the man’s identity to AFP and that he was injured in the strike.
In a joint statement, the Israeli military, the Shin Bet security service and the Israeli police announced that they had arrested the man at a hospital in Nablus.
They accused him of being “the third member of a terrorist cell that carried out the shooting attack” at Mehola junction in August in which an Israeli was killed. They also accused him of planning to carry out further attacks and posing “an imminent threat to Israeli civilians.”
The Palestinian health ministry called on “international institutions” and the Red Cross to “intervene immediately to stop the occupation’s attacks on treatment centers and staff, demanding immediate protection for the health system and all its components.”
The Israeli organizations said: “The security forces will continue to operate wherever necessary to thwart terrorism in the area and to maintain the safety of Israeli civilians.”


Qatar emir and UK prime minister discuss investment relations

Qatar emir and UK prime minister discuss investment relations
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani shake hands at Downing Street. (Reuters)
Updated 04 December 2024
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Qatar emir and UK prime minister discuss investment relations

Qatar emir and UK prime minister discuss investment relations
  • In talks at Downing Street, Keir Starmer welcomed Qatar’s £1 billion investment in British climate technologies
  • Sheikh Tamim wrapped up his two-day state visit to Britain, which included meeting King Charles

LONDON: UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer welcomed Qatar’s £1 billion investment in British climate technologies as he met the emir on the final day of a state visit to London.

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani held talks with Starmer at his Downing Street residence on Wednesday afternoon.

During the meeting, the two leaders agreed that Qatar and the UK’s “thriving investment relationship would continue to grow and deliver significant benefits for both countries,” Starmer’s office said. 

They also discussed strengthening defense ties and Qatar’s mediation role in the Middle East, including in Gaza.

Earlier, the UK announced the agreement with Qatar to invest £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in British climate technologies.

Engineering company Rolls-Royce will receive investment in technology programs that “improve energy efficiency, support new sustainable fuels and lower carbon emissions,” the UK government said.

Qatar is one of the largest purchasers of Rolls-Royce engines, which are used in some Qatar Airways jets.

“Enabling the energy transition through lower carbon technologies is a key part of our strategy,” Rolls-Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgic said. “We are delighted to welcome Qatar as a strategic partner, who will support the growth of these technologies. They share our ambition to make an impact on the challenge of climate change.”

The UK partnership with Qatar is expected to create thousands of highly skilled jobs and will launch climate technology hubs across the UK and Qatar, the UK government said.

It will include investment in start-ups in the UK and Qatar focusing on energy efficiency, carbon management and green power.

Starmer said that the deal was a “significant step in our ambition to become a clean energy superpower and further evidence that the UK is one of the best places in the world for companies to develop those technologies.”

Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Abdulrahman Al-Thani said: “The United Kingdom has a proud history of innovation in cutting-edge technology, and Qatar has long been a trusted investment partner to British businesses.

“This new collaboration aligns with our long-term strategy to invest in the economies of the future.”

On Tuesday, Sheikh Tamim and Sheikha Jawaher bint Hamad bin Suhaim Al-Thani were greeted by Prince William and the Princess of Wales, before taking a royal carriage procession to meet King Charles.

On Wednesday the emir visited Sandhurst military academy, which he attended in the 1990s.


Israel PM announces body of hostage recovered from Gaza in ‘special operation’

Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said that Israeli forces have recovered the body of Svirsky in Gaza. (AP)
Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said that Israeli forces have recovered the body of Svirsky in Gaza. (AP)
Updated 05 December 2024
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Israel PM announces body of hostage recovered from Gaza in ‘special operation’

Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said that Israeli forces have recovered the body of Svirsky in Gaza. (AP)
  • Body of Svirsky was recovered in an operation by the Shin Bet internal security agency, aided by the military
  • Hostages and Missing Families Forum welcomed the return of Svirsky’s body while demanding the immediate release of the remaining hostages

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a statement Wednesday that the body of a hostage had been recovered from the Gaza Strip.
“In a special operation, the body of hostage Itay Svirsky, who was kidnapped on October 7 (2023) from kibbutz Beeri and murdered in captivity by Hamas terrorists in January 2024, was brought back,” Netanyahu said in a statement released by his office.
The body of Svirsky, who was 38 when he was kidnapped during Hamas’s surprise attack, was recovered in an operation by the Shin Bet internal security agency, aided by the military, both organizations confirmed in a joint statement.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a campaign group for relatives of those abducted to Gaza, welcomed the return of Svirsky’s body while demanding the immediate release of the remaining hostages.
“The families continue to wait for their loved ones after 425 days of captivity. Many hostages remain alive but in grave danger, requiring immediate release for urgent medical care and rehabilitation. Others must be returned for dignified burial,” it said.
Separately on Wednesday, the Israeli military released a statement on its investigation into the deaths of six hostages, whose bodies were recovered in August.
The military said they were likely executed by their captors as Israel struck near their location in February.
“According to the most plausible scenario, the terrorists shot the hostages close to the time of the strike,” the military said.
During the October 7, 2023 attack, militants kidnapped 251 people, 96 of whom remain in Gaza, including 34 declared dead by the Israeli military.
Svirsky’s is the 38th body of a hostage to be brought back from the Gaze Strip.


Israeli strikes on a Gaza tent camp kill at least 21 people, hospital says

Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen, amid a hunger crisis, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip
Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen, amid a hunger crisis, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip
Updated 04 December 2024
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Israeli strikes on a Gaza tent camp kill at least 21 people, hospital says

Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen, amid a hunger crisis, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip
  • The strikes were the latest deadly assault in the war-wracked Gaza Strip, where Israel’s offensive against Hamas is nearly 14 months old and showing no end in sight

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: Israeli aircraft struck a sprawling tent camp housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people, according to a local health official, setting off fires in the coastal tent city that Israel has designated a humanitarian zone but which has been repeatedly targeted.
The Israeli military said it struck senior Hamas militants “involved in terrorist activities” in the area, without providing additional details, and said it took precautions to minimize harm to civilians.
The strikes were the latest deadly assault in the war-wracked Gaza Strip, where Israel’s offensive against Hamas is nearly 14 months old and showing no end in sight, despite international efforts to revive negotiations toward a ceasefire.
The Biden administration has pledged to make a new push to get a ceasefire for Gaza after Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah agreed to end more than a year of cross-border fighting. And President-elect Donald Trump demanded in a social media post this week the release of hostages held by Hamas before he is sworn into office in January.
The strike Wednesday in Muwasi, a desolate area with few public services that holds hundreds of thousands of displaced people, also wounded at least 28 people, according to Atif Al-Hout, the director of Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
An Associated Press journalist at the hospital counted at least 15 bodies, but he said reaching a precise number was difficult because many of the dead were dismembered, some without heads or badly burned.
Videos and photos shared widely on social media showed flames and a column of black smoke rising into the night sky, as well as twisted metal tent frames and shredded fabric. Palestinian men searched through the still-burning wreckage, shouting “Over here guys!” Further away, civilians stood at a distance, observing the destruction.
The military said the strikes had set off secondary explosions, indicating explosives present in the area had detonated. It was not possible to independently confirm the Israeli claims, and the strikes could also have ignited fuel, cooking gas canisters or other materials in the camp.
The strikes followed earlier Israeli attacks on other parts of the Gaza Strip that killed eight people, four of them children, according to Palestinian medics. The military said it had struck “terrorist targets” in a series of strikes.
On Wednesday, Israel said its forces recovered the body of one hostage who was captured alive during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war, yet who Israel believes was killed by his captors. Israel believes about a third of the remaining 100 hostages are dead.