Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported that a series of Israeli strikes on south Beirut caused “massive destruction” and razed four buildings on Tuesday
The Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs “are still being subjected to a series of strikes, the latest of which hit the main road at Al-Kafaat, and caused massive destruction” in several south Beirut neighbourhoods, AFP quoted NNA as saying.
The Lebanese agency said “four adjacent residential buildings collapsed in the Burj al-Barajneh area after the recent Israeli strike”.
Smoke rises over Rafik Hariri International Airport as a result of an Israeli airstrike at Dahieh in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, 08 October 2024. Photograph: Wael Hamzeh/EPA
Donald Trump claims to have visited Gaza, says it could be 'better than Monaco'
Robert Tait
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has raised eyebrows after telling Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio host, that he had visited Gaza, where nearly 42,000 people have been killed and the majority of buildings badly damaged or destroyed in blistering Israeli military attacks responding to last year’s 7 October attack by Hamas. The Hamas attack killed 1,200 about Israelis and took about 250 hostage.
Asked by Hewitt if Gaza could be transformed into Monaco if properly rebuilt, Trump replied:
It could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything. It’s got, it is the best, I’ve said it for years.
I’ve been there, and it’s rough. It’s a rough place … before all of the attacks and before the back and forth what’s happened over the last couple of years.
He went on: “
I mean, they have the back of a plant facing the ocean, you know. There was no ocean as far as that was concerned. They never took advantage of it. You know, as a developer, it could be the most beautiful place – the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate. It could be so beautiful. It could be the best thing in the Middle East.
Hewitt did not challenge Trump’s assertion to have visited the territory, which had suffered substantial infrastructural damage in repeated clashes between Hamas, the militant group that has dominated it for years, and Israel even before the current war.
However, the New York Times said there was no record of Trump ever having gone there – either when he was president or before.
The paper quoted a campaign official, who said:
Gaza is in Israel. President Trump has been to Israel.
In fact, Gaza has never been part of Israel, although some far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current coalition government have called for its annexation.
Bob Woodward’s new book also portrays vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, as a shrewd and loyal deputy to Joe Biden but not an influential voice in his administration’s foreign policy.
Excerpts in the Washington Post recount how her forceful public tone following a meeting in July with Benjamin Netanyahu– pledging that she would “not be silent” about Palestinian suffering – contrasted with her more amicable approach in private. The difference, according to Woodward, infuriated Netanyahu, who was taken aback by her public remarks.
From the Israeli viewpoint, however, Harris had little responsibility for the administration’s approach to the conflict.
“Until now, I didn’t feel that Vice President Harris had any impact on our issues,” Michael Herzog, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, is quoted as saying about the period before Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. “She was in the room, but she never had an impact.”
US vice president and presidential contender Kamala Harris has said the US must not lose hope of finding a resolution to the Israel-Gaza conflict, in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Harris said:
We must have a ceasefire and hostage deal as immediately as possible. This war has got to end. It has to end. We cannot lose some belief in the possibility of it. Because then, to your point, we throw up our hands instead of rolling up our sleeves.
Asked what “close” means when the public has been told Israel and Hamas were close to a deal, Harris responded:
Close means that a lot of the details have been worked out but details remain. And so there has been some progress but it is meaningless unless a deal is actually reached, so I don’t want to suggest to you that we should be applauded for getting close at times to a deal ...
We must work and the United States must work and not lose hope and not throw up our hands around the role we must play in urging and seeking and building toward a resolution. And the first thing that’s going to unlock that is we’ve got to get a deal done and we’re not going to give up.
Negotiations on a ceasefire have repeatedly stalled, with both sides accusing the other of refusing to agree to a deal. Israel also assassinated Hamas’ top negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, in a strike on Tehran in July.
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, War, offers an unvarnished peek behind the curtains of President Joe Biden’s disagreements with Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he offered Israel support publicly in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks.
Excerpts of the book were released by Woodward’s two employers, the Washington Post and CNN.
“That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” Biden declared privately about the Israeli prime minister to one of his associates in the spring of 2024 as Israel’s war in Gaza intensified, Woodward writes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) meets with US President Joe Biden for a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on 25 July 2024. Photograph: Samuel Corum/EPA
Biden, according to Woodward, was cautious about setting limits on Israel’s conduct lest Netanyahu blow past them. In a one-on-one call in April, Netanyahu promised Biden that the Rafah offensive would take only three weeks, a vow the American president never took seriously. “It’ll take months,” Biden replied.
To associates, Biden complained that Netanyahu was a liar only interested in his political survival. And he concluded the same of the prime minister’s associates, saying that 18 out of 19 people who work for Netanyahu are “liars.”
White House senior deputy press secretary Emilie Simons wouldn’t be drawn on the anecdotes, telling reporters Tuesday, “They have a long-term relationship. They have a very honest and direct relationship, and I don’t have a comment on those specific anecdotes.”
British foreign secretary David Lammy is to meet leaders in Bahrain and Jordan as part of efforts to prevent the conflict in the Middle East from escalating further, Reuters reports.
Lammy will arrive in the region on Wednesday and will “reaffirm the importance of working with regional partners to press the case for restraint and will demand Iran and its proxies stop their attacks,” the foreign office said in a statement. Lammy said further:
The situation is incredibly dangerous and further escalation or miscalculation in the region is in no one’s interests …
We must not waver at this critical period to achieve ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, to get more desperately needed aid into Gaza, and secure the release of all hostages.
Abarrage of messages in the middle of the night broke the news to Ahmed Alnaouq that his family home in Deir al-Balah was not the safest place in Gaza – as he had once thought. It was on that autumn night almost a year ago that he learned that almost his entire family had been wiped out in a single Israeli airstrike.
Thousands of miles away in London, he had woken from his sleep suddenly feeling a deep unease, he says. Moments before, his father, siblings, their children and a cousin were killed – 21 relatives altogether.
“That bomb that day changed my life for ever. I live here [in London] but they’re everything I care about,” says Alnaouq.
Only a cousin and their child survived the strike, which would have been even worse had it taken place a few days earlier. More than 50 relatives had been crowded into the house because of its perceived safety, right in the centre of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza – a long way from Gaza City, which had until then been the focus of Israeli operations. But many of those relatives left just before the strike on 22 October.
Alnaouq’s experience of family members being killed in war predates the past year’s conflict. In the 2014 war in Gaza his brother was killed in another Israeli airstrike. The nature of his grief then, he says, was different. That time, he had only one brother to mourn, but this time he lost his entire family. Whenever he thought of one person, he felt his thoughts drift to another.
Al Jazeera cameraman in critical condition after Israeli strike on hospital
An Al Jazeera cameraman has been seriously injured in an Israeli strike on a hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.
Ali al-Attar, 27, suffered a skull fracture and internal bleeding in the brain, after two pieces of shrapnel hit his head in the strike, which targeted a police checkpoint inside the hospital next to the journalists’ tent, the Qatar-based broadcaster reported.
Doctors said his condition was critical especially in light of the depleted medical facilities at the hospital.
Other journalists were appealing to international humanitarian and media organisation to intervene to have al-Attar transferred for treatment outside Gaza.
Al Jazeera cameraman Ali al-Attar, who was wounded in an Israeli attack on al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Al-Aqsa hospital is the only functioning hospital left in central Gaza and is also home to displaced people but it has been attacked by the Israeli military on multiple occasions.
Earlier this week a 19-year-old Palestinian freelance journalist, Hassan Hamad, who had contributed to Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli strike on northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is now reporting nine people were killed, five of them civilians including a child.
Footage from the scene showed a building engulfed in smoke, with rubble and torn metal strewn on the ground.
Electrician Adel Habib, 61, who lives in the building which was hit, said the strike was like “Judgment Day”.
I was on my way home when the explosion happened and communications and electricity were cut off so I could no longer contact my family.
These were the longest five minutes of my life until I heard the voices of my wife, children and grandchildren.
The Syrian foreign ministry condemned “in the strongest terms this brutal crime against defenceless civilians” calling for “immediate measures” to stop Israel from dragging the region “into a confrontation that will have disastrous consequences”.
Al Jazeera has just reported “a massive airstrike” Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, about 30km east of Beirut, and at least four strikes on Dahiyeh, the southern suburb of Beirut believed to be a Hezbollah stronghold and where its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed a week and a half ago.
Smoke rises over Rafik Hariri International Airport after an Israeli airstrike on the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh. Photograph: Wael Hamzeh/EPA
It’s 1am in Tel Aviv, Gaza and Beirut. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
Seven people, including women and children, were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Damascus on Tuesday, the Syrian defence ministry said. The strike obliterated the first three floors of a building in the Mezzeh neighbourhood, east of Damascus, according to AP. At least 11 others were also wounded in the attack, the Syrian ministry said, adding that they were only preliminary figures as rescuers are still searching for survivors under the rubble.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has cancelled plans for a visit to Washington scheduled for this week, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. The Israeli minister was expected to visit Washington and meet with his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, on Wednesday. The announcement came after reports that Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered Gallant not to travel to the Pentagon for talks on Iran until the Israeli prime minister receives a phone call with Joe Biden and until the Israeli security cabinet approves the response to Iran’s missile attack.
Israel said it is expanding its ground operation in Lebanon with the deployment of a fourth division. The number of Israeli troops on the ground is now likely to number 15,000. The rapid deployment of four divisions operating across south Lebanon, alongside evacuation orders for Lebanese villages on the coast upwards of 20 miles from the blue line and the intensive bombing of the country’s south and east and the capital, suggests Israel is preparing for a wider push north against the Lebanese militia.
The Israeli military launched new airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Tuesday. The night before, Israel again bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs where Hezbollah is headquartered and said it had killed Suhail Hussein Husseini, commander of Hezbollah’s logistical headquarters. Lebanon’s mayor, Abdallah Darwich, said there is “no safe place in Beirut” because of Israel’s attacks. Lebanon’s capital city has been the site of an intense Israeli bombing campaign over the last few weeks, flattening residential buildings and heavily populated civilian areas.
The Lebanese health ministry said on Tuesday that 36 people have been killed in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours. At least 1,400 Lebanese people, including civilians, medics and Hezbollah fighters, have been killed and 1.2 million – about a quarter of the population – have been driven from their homes since fighting escalated three weeks ago. In Gaza, at least 41,965 Palestinian people have been killedin Israeli strikes and 97,590 injured since 7 October 2023, according to figures by Gaza’s health ministry on Tuesday.
Fighting also continues to rage in Gaza. Israeli airstrikes killed 17 people in a refugee camp in the centre of the Palestinian territory on Tuesday, medics said. At least 15 people, including two women and four children, were killed on Tuesday in ground fighting in the Jabaliya neighbourhood of Gaza City, the nearby Kamal Adwan hospital said, after new Israeli evacuation orders for the city were issued on Monday. The IDF has intensified bombing of the area and moved in tanks. The Israeli military said it killed about 20 militants in Jabaliya and located a large quantity of weapons, including grenades and rifles.
The Israeli military also ordered the full evacuation of all three main hospitals in northern Gaza – Al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals, the territory’s health ministry said. Israeli forces shot at the administration office at the Kamal Adwan hospital, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which said that the complex was being besieged. Médecins Sans Frontières warned that the Israeli evacuation orders will worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian territory. The three northern Gaza hospitals “must be protected at all costs”, it added.
Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces have taken out the would-be successors of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, without naming them. The Israeli prime minister also warned the people of Lebanon they could face “destruction and suffering” like the Palestinians in Gaza. Earlier on Tuesday, Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant said Hashem Safieddine, the man expected to replace Nasrallah, had probably been “eliminated”. Hezbollah has not confirmed Safieddine’s death.
Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, said that the question of who will succeed Nasrallah remains undecided. In a defiant speech on Tuesday, Qassem said the group’s military capabilities were still functional despite two weeks of heavy Israeli airstrikes. Hezbollah had replaced all of its senior commanders, he said, and Israeli ground troops had not made any advances after a week of fighting. Two Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut’s Shia-majority southern suburbs almost immediately after Qassem’s speech.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, warned Israel that any attack on Iran’s infrastructure will be met with retaliation, a week after Tehran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel. On Monday evening Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that Tehran’s military had prepared at least ten scenarios preparing for an expected Israeli attack.
Hezbollah fired another barrage of rockets into Israel on Tuesday and warned that it would intensify attacks on Israel, including the northern port city of Haifa, if it continues to strike Lebanon. The IDF said Hezbollah launched more than 170 rockets across the border. The Israeli government warned residents north of the coastal city of Haifa to limit activities, prompting the closure of more schools.
Israel’s home front command tightened restrictions on civilians in the port city of Haifa on Tuesday in the wake of a barrage of rockets launched by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah said it had fired rockets towards the Haifa and Krayot area in northern Israel, having launched “a large salvo of missiles”. About seven people were injured in the attack, according to reports. Hezbollah rockets also hit Haifa early on Monday morning, in what was the first direct attack on the city that evaded the military’s usually reliable air defence systems.
Hezbollah said it killed and injured Israeli soldiers crossing the Lebanese border near a UN position near the al-Labouneh forest, in the western section of the border area. Hezbollah said that the attack forced Israeli soldiers to withdraw behind the border.
Ireland’s prime minister, Simon Harris, said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrawal from a firing position next to Irish peacekeepers on the Lebanese border was “extremely welcome”. Harris said he had spoken to UN secretary general, António Guterres, about his deep concerns about their safety after the IDF requested them to vacate their positions to make way for their war on Hezbollah.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, warned that Lebanon is on the verge of “an all-out war” and Gaza is “in a death spiral.” Guterres, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, said that the Middle East “is a powder keg with many parties holding the match” and that the conflict is “getting worse by the hour”. He said he has written to Netanyahu warning him that draft Israeli legislation to prevent the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) from working in the occupied Palestinian territory would be a “catastrophe”.
The World Food Programme country director in Lebanon voiced concern about the country’s food supply, saying thousands of hectares of farmland across the country’s south has burned or been abandoned. “Agriculture-wise, food production-wise, (there is) extraordinary concern for Lebanon’s ability to continue to feed itself,” Matthew Hollingworth told reporters on Tuesday.
Joe Biden, the US president, pulled out of scheduled talks between the leaders of the US, UK, France and Germany on the Middle East and Ukraine on Saturday. Biden will no longer be travelling to Berlin in order to focus on the response to Hurricane Milton, expected to make landfall as an “extremely dangerous hurricane” in Florida on Wednesday night, local time, the White House said.
Israeli forces detained at least 30 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, including a journalist, Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reports, citing updates from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society and the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Over 11,000 Palestinians have been detained in Israeli raids across the occupied West Bank since last October, the groups have said.
Prosecutors in the Netherlands are considering a request to open a criminal case against senior Israeli intelligence officials for allegedly interfering with an investigation by the international criminal court (ICC).
US says Hezbollah ceasefire call shows it is 'getting battered'
A US state department spokesperson said Hezbollah’s call for a ceasefire earlier on Tuesday shows the group is on the back foot and “getting battered”.
Hezbollah’s acting secretary general, Naim Qassem, said during a speech earlier today that the group’s military capabilities were still functional despite two weeks of heavy Israeli airstrikes, including Beirut bombings that killed the group’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and much of the militia’s top command.
Qassem also said the group supported the efforts of Lebanon’s speaker of parliament Nabih Berri, to secure a ceasefire, without providing further details on any conditions demanded by Hezbollah.
US state department spokesperson Matthew Miller, at a briefing in Washington on Tuesday, said:
For a year, you had the world calling for this ceasefire, you had Hezbollah refusing to agree to one, and now that Hezbollah is on the back foot and is getting battered, suddenly they’ve changed their tune and want a ceasefire.
He added that the US continues to want a diplomatic solution to the conflict.
Miller also said the Biden administration no longer supports an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, according to the Washington Post’s John Hudson:
Biden administration no longer supporting an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, says State Department spokesman Matthew Miller: "Yes, we do support Israel launching these incursions to degrade Hezbollah's infrastructure."
Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) reported that a series of Israeli strikes on south Beirut caused “massive destruction” and razed four buildings on Tuesday
The Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs “are still being subjected to a series of strikes, the latest of which hit the main road at Al-Kafaat, and caused massive destruction” in several south Beirut neighbourhoods, AFP quoted NNA as saying.
The Lebanese agency said “four adjacent residential buildings collapsed in the Burj al-Barajneh area after the recent Israeli strike”.
Smoke rises over Rafik Hariri International Airport as a result of an Israeli airstrike at Dahieh in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, 08 October 2024. Photograph: Wael Hamzeh/EPA
Médecins Sans Frontières warned that the latest Israeli evacuation orders for parts of northern Gaza, which include three main hospitals in the area, worsen the humanitarian catastrophe in the Palestinian territory.
On Tuesday, Israel sent tanks deeper into Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip and issued evacuation orders to residents of Jabalia and nearby Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians were instructed to head to a humanitarian-designated zone in Al-Mawasi in the south of the crowded coastal territory.
These forced mass evacuations of homes and the bombing of neighbourhoods by Israeli forces are turning the north of Gaza into an “unlivable wasteland”, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Tuesday.
The medical organisation called for Israeli forces to “urgently halt evacuation orders, ensure the protection of civilians, and allow desperately needed humanitarian supplies to enter the north.”
It said that the so-called humanitarian zone where people were ordered to move to “remains unsafe for civilians and aid workers as Israeli forces continue to repeatedly strike the area.”
It said the three main hospitals in northern Gaza – Indonesian, Kamal Adwan, and Al-Awda hospitals – “must be protected at all costs”, adding that “Each time a medical facility is evacuated or attacked, people lose access to lifesaving medical care.”
Israeli forces orders evacuation of three main hospitals in northern Gaza
ActionAid said it is “gravely alarmed” by reports from Gaza’s health ministry that the Israeli military has ordered the full evacuation of the Al-Awda, Indonesian, and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern Gaza.
Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital, which lies between Beit Lahia and Jabalia, told CNN on Tuesday:
The army spoke to me directly in threatening language that tomorrow all the patients will be forced out of Kamal Adwan hospital … or else we would subject our lives to danger.
He said the hospital was the only operating hospital in northern Gaza and that it would continue to provide medical services. He added:
Putting the hospital out of service would be a big disaster for the people who need [it] … There are still many patients in the hospital and there are many babies and children in the neonatal unit, so it is difficult to evacuate.
Israeli forces shot at the administration office at the Kamal Adwan hospital, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which said that the complex was being besieged.
Similar evacuation orders were issued at the Indonesian hospital and the Al-Awda hospital, it said.
ActionAid said the Al-Awda hospital is a “vital healthcare facility serving the most vulnerable in Gaza”, and said that forcing its evacuation “is not only unconscionable but also a violation of international humanitarian law.”
