Gaza City, Palestinian Territories — Gaza’s civil defense agency said an Israeli strike on Friday night near Jabalia in the territory’s north killed 33 people at a refugee camp.
Agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal announced “33 deaths and dozens of wounded” while a medical source at the Al-Awda hospital told AFP earlier that it had registered 22 dead and 70 wounded after the strike on the Tal al-Zaatar camp for Palestinian refugees.
Asked for comment about overnight strikes in the area, an Israeli army spokesperson said they were “looking into it”.
On October 6, Israel launched a new offensive in northern Gaza, including around Jabalia, saying it was targeting Hamas fighters who were regrouping there.
Since then, scores of people have been killed in the area, which had already been hit hard by fighting earlier in the year-long war.
The UN humanitarian affairs agency said Friday night that it continued “to sound the alarm about the increasingly dire and dangerous situation that civilians in northern Gaza are facing. Families there are trying to survive in atrocious conditions, under heavy bombardment.”
HAMAS: DOWN BUT NOT OUT
Hamas vowed Friday that it would not release the hostages seized during its October 7 attack on Israel until the Gaza war ends, as it mourned the death of its leader Yahya Sinwar.
The killing of Sinwar, the mastermind of the deadliest attack in Israeli history, had raised hopes of a turning point in the war, including for families of the Israeli hostages and Gazans enduring a dire humanitarian crisis.
But Qatar-based Hamas official Khalil al-Hayya, who mourned Sinwar in a video statement, reiterated the Palestinian group’s position that no hostages would be released “unless the aggression against our people in Gaza stops”.
Israeli forces pummeled Gaza with air strikes on Friday, with rescuers recovering the bodies of three Palestinian children from the rubble of their home in the north of the territory, according to Gaza’s civil defense agency.
“We always thought that when this moment arrived the war would end and our lives would return to normal,” Jemaa Abou Mendi, a 21-year-old Gaza resident, told AFP.
“But unfortunately, the reality on the ground is quite the opposite. The war has not stopped, and the killings continue unabated.”
Sinwar was Israel’s most wanted man, and his death — announced by the Israeli military on Thursday — deals a major blow to the already weakened group.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Sinwar’s killing an “important landmark in the decline of the evil rule of Hamas”.
While it did not spell the end of the war, it was “the beginning of the end,” he added.
Some hailed the news of Sinwar’s death as a sign of better things to come.
US President Joe Biden, whose government is Israel’s top arms provider, said Sinwar’s death was “an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas”.
In a joint statement, Biden and the leaders of Germany, France and Britain emphasized “the immediate necessity to bring the hostages home to their families, for ending the war in Gaza, and ensure humanitarian aid reaches civilians”.
Former US president Donald Trump, who is seeking a second term in elections next month, said Sinwar’s death would make it “easier” to achieve peace.
Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum urged Israel’s government and international mediators to leverage “this major achievement to secure hostages’ return”.
In August, Netanyahu called Sinwar “the only obstacle to a hostage deal”.
Ayala Metzger, daughter-in-law of killed hostage Yoram Metzger, said with Sinwar dead it was “unacceptable” that the hostages would “stay in captivity even one more day”.
But she added: “We (are) afraid that Netanyahu does not intend on stopping the war, nor does he intend to bring the hostages back.”
An Israeli autopsy found that Sinwar was initially wounded in the arm by shrapnel, but killed by a gunshot to the head, the New York Times reported.
The Times said it was unclear who fired the shot or when, and what weapon was used.
Since the war began following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas, a “conservative” estimate puts the death toll among children in Gaza at over 14,100, said James Elder, spokesman of the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF.
For the one million children in the besieged territory, “Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on Earth,” Elder said.
Criticism has been mounting over the civilian toll and lack of food and aid reaching Gaza, where the UN has warned of famine.
THE HEZBOLLAH ANGLE
Israel is also fighting a war with Hamas ally Hezbollah in Lebanon. The two sides had exchanged rocket fire since the October 7 attack, with Israel sending ground troops across the Lebanese border last month.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it had destroyed Hezbollah’s regional command center with an air strike.
Hezbollah said it fired a salvo of rockets at the Israeli city of Haifa and areas to its north.
The group later said it launched “a swarm of explosives-laden drones” at an “air missile defense base” east of the central Israeli city of Hadera.
The UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon warned that the escalating war “is causing widespread destruction of towns and villages” in the country’s south.
Since late September, the war has left at least 1,418 people dead in Lebanon, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures, though the real toll is likely higher.
The war has also drawn in other Iran-aligned armed groups, including in Yemen, Iraq and Syria.
The Israeli military on Friday said it had intercepted an “aerial target” approaching from Syria, which a war monitor said was a drone launched by an Iran-backed group.
Iran conducted a missile strike on Israel on October 1, for which Israel has vowed to retaliate.
TURKEY MOURNS DEAD HAMAS LEADER
In Istanbul, Turkey’s foreign minister on Friday offered his “condolences” to Hamas officials at a meeting in the city following the death of the Palestinian militant group’s leader Yahya Sinwar.
Hakan Fidan “received the president of the Hamas Shura Council Mohammed Ismail Darwish and members of the political bureau” in Istanbul to whom “he presented his condolences for the martyr Yahya Sinwar,” the ministry said in a statement.
At the meeting they also discussed “the state of recent negotiations for a ceasefire deal allowing the exchange of hostages and prisoners”, Fidan’s ministry said.
“Fidan reiterated that Turkey would use all diplomatic means to mobilize the international community against the humanitarian catastrophe underway in Gaza,” it added.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was close with Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Tehran in July.
LEBANON PRIME MINISTER SLAMS IRAN
In Beirut, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati offered a rare rebuke of Iran on Friday, charging it with “blatant interference” over remarks attributed to its parliament speaker about a UN resolution on Hezbollah and Lebanon.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which was adopted in 2006 and calls for only the Lebanese army and UN peacekeepers to be deployed in southern Lebanon, has come into focus during the latest Israel-Hezbollah war.
In remarks published by France’s Le Figaro newspaper on Thursday, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf reportedly said his government was ready to negotiate on the implementation of the resolution, which is seen as a precondition for a ceasefire in the war.
Mikati hit back, accusing Iran of “blatant interference in Lebanese affairs and an attempt to establish an unacceptable guardianship over Lebanon”.
“The issue of negotiating to implement international resolution 1701 is being undertaken by the Lebanese state,” Mikati said in a statement released by his office.
“Everyone is required to support it in this direction, not to seek to impose new mandates.”
Such public criticism is rare for the Lebanese government, over which Iran-backed Hezbollah holds sway.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry later said that the charge d’affaires at Iran’s Beirut embassy, Meysam Ghahrmani, had been summoned to discuss Ghalibaf’s remarks at Mikati’s request.
Beirut emphasized Lebanon’s “keenness on making the necessary diplomatic efforts to stop the ongoing Israeli aggression on (Lebanon) by applying Resolution 1701 while protecting its sovereignty… and the security of its people and civil peace”, a foreign ministry statement said on X.
Hezbollah is considered to be more heavily armed than Lebanon’s national military, and is the only group that did not disarm following the Lebanese 1975-1990 civil war.
Israel has vowed to keep fighting Hezbollah until it secures its northern border with Israel, and to date the Iran-backed group has said it will not put down its weapons until a ceasefire is agreed not only for Lebanon but also in Gaza.
The Lebanese government is pushing for a de-escalation in Lebanon that does not link the country’s fate to that of the Palestinian territory.
Israel has been at war in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, which killed 1,206 people, a majority civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures that includes hostages killed in captivity.
Hezbollah opened up a new front in the war in support of its ally Hamas by launching low-intensity attacks across the Lebanese frontier, with Israel then also launching cross-border strikes, in deadly violence that caused tens of thousands of people to flee on both sides.
Hezbollah and Hamas are part of the so-called axis of resistance, a regional alliance of pro-Iran armed groups.
Iran’s foreign minister and parliament speaker have both visited Lebanon since all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah erupted last month.
Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a south Beirut air strike on September 27, dealing the group a seismic blow.
On Tuesday, Mikati told AFP that his country was ready to bolster the army’s presence in the country’s south if there is a ceasefire.
“The Lebanese state is ready to impose its sovereignty over all of Lebanese territory,” he said.
Mikati said his cash-strapped government would start by recruiting an additional 1,500 troops into the army, and that as soon as any ceasefire is agreed they would mobilize soldiers from elsewhere in Lebanon.
Israel on September 30 launched a ground offensive into neighboring Lebanon, and Hezbollah has since reported regular clashes between its fighters and Israeli troops in border villages.
The Iran-backed group has said it was launching “a new and escalatory phase” against Israel as fighting rages at close range.