Top Hezbollah commander killed
The Israeli military said yesterday it had killed a top Hezbollah commander it accused of overseeing rocket and anti-tank missile attacks against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
Abu Ali Rida, the Hezbollah commander of the Baraachit area in southern Lebanon, was “eliminated” in an airstrike, the military said, without specifying when he was killed.
Rida “was responsible for planning and executing rocket and anti-tank missile attacks on IDF (military) troops and oversaw the terrorist activities of Hezbollah operatives in the area”, the military said in a statement.
Israel has continued to pound Hezbollah targets in Lebanon since the war between the two sides broke out in late September.
Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group said it fired rockets at the northern Israeli city of Safed yesterday. Hezbollah fighters launched a “big rocket salvo” at the city, the group said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Israel formally notified the United Nations of its decision to sever ties with the agency supporting Palestinian refugees, it said yesterday, after lawmakers voted to ban the organisation vital to the occupied territories.
The ban, which sparked global condemnation including from key Israeli backer the United States, should come into force in late January, with the UN Security Council warning it would have severe consequences for millions of Palestinians.
Israel has accused a dozen employees of the agency, UNRWA, of participating in the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said yesterday that at least 43,374 people have been killed in the year-long Israeli offensive in the Palestinian enclave.
Germany called on Israel to let more humanitarian aid into north Gaza, where a lack of supplies has led to a “desperate” and “unbearable” situation, a spokesperson for the German foreign ministry said yesterday.
“We call on the Israeli government urgently to meet its responsibilities under international law,” the spokesperson told a regular news conference in Berlin.
Israeli military yesterday denied that it had hit a clinic in the northern Gaza Strip where health workers were carrying out polio vaccinations.
On Saturday, the Gaza health ministry said Israeli fire had hit the Sheikh Radwan clinic as parents brought their children in to be vaccinated. It said four children had been wounded in the explosion, which took place during an agreed humanitarian pause to allow the campaign to go ahead.
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