A senior commander of the militant group Hezbollah was killed Monday in an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon, raising concerns of a wider Mideast war as fighting raged near the main hospital in central Gaza.
The strike targeting an SUV driven by Wissam al-Tawil comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting regional capitals in a bid to head off an expanded conflict.
In Gaza, Israel says it has largely concluded major operations in northern part of the territory and is now focusing on the central region and the southern city of Khan Younis.
Medical staff, patients and displaced people fled the main hospital in central Gaza as fighting drew closer, witnesses said Monday. Omar al-Darawi, an employee at the Al-Aqsa hospital, said the facility has been struck multiple times in recent days.
Hamas' Oct. 7 attack from Gaza into southern Israel triggered the war and killed around 1,200 people, and militants took some 250 others hostage. Israel’s air, ground and sea assault in Gaza has killed more than 22,400 people, two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. The count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Currently:
— With every strike and counterstrike, Israel, the US and Iran’s allies inch closer to all-out war
— Israel says Hezbollah struck sensitive air traffic base in the north and warns of ‘another war’
— Blinken brings US push on post-war Gaza planning and stopping conflict to UAE and Saudi Arabia
— Seven Palestinians, an Israeli policewoman and a motorist are killed in West Bank violence
— An Al Jazeera journalist is the fifth member of his family killed by Israeli strikes on Gaza
— Find more of AP's coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war.
Here's what's happening in the war:
AL ULA, Saudi Arabia — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says four Arab nations and Turkey have agreed to begin planning for post-conflict reconstruction and governance of Gaza once Israel’s war against Hamas ends.
On an urgent Mideast mission aimed primarily at preventing the conflict from spreading amid resurgent fears of a regional war, Blinken said Monday that Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey would consider participating in and contributing to “day after” scenarios for the territory, which has been decimated by three months of Israeli bombardment. Those countries had previously resisted U.S. calls for post-war planning to begin, insisting that there must first be a cease-fire and sharp reduction in civilians suffering caused by Israel’s response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
On his latest Mideast tour, his fourth since the war began in October, Blinken said those countries were now open to such planning and that each would consider their own involvement in what is eventually decided upon.
“We agreed to work together and to coordinate our efforts to help Gaza stabilize and recover, to chart a political path forward for the Palestinians and to work toward long-term peace, security and stability in the region as a whole,” Blinken told reporters.
He did not offer specifics on potential contributions.
He also said the countries had agreed to use what leverage and influence they may have to prevent the Gaza war from widening into a broader Mideast conflict that would be devastating for the region and have significant negative impacts on international trade and the global economy.
Blinken made the comments after meeting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at his winter camp outside the city of Al Ula in western Saudi Arabia, which the country is transforming into a major tourist destination.
UNITED NATIONS — The intensifying Israeli offensive in central and southern Gaza has “devastating consequences,” driving up civilian casualties, severely curtailing aid operations in the central region and risking the closure of three major hospitals, the U.N. humanitarian office says.
U.N. associate spokesperson Florencia Soto Niño told reporters Monday that the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that attacks have impacted tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom had fled from Gaza City and the north to seek safety in central areas like Deir al-Balah.
As a result of increased attacks, she said, shelters, health centers, warehouses and distribution points in Deir al-Balah have newly been issued with evacuation orders and several bakeries supported by the U.N. and its partners have been forced to stop operating.
“As casualties rise, the ability to treat people is in jeopardy, with three hospitals in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the south at risk of closure due to the issuance of evacuation orders in nearby areas and fighting approaching the hospitals, Soto Niño said.
“We continue to call for restraint and for all of the actors involved to do everything in their power to prevent the escalation of the situation in the region,” Soto Niño said.
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military says it has uncovered a large weapons-production site in central Gaza where Hamas was building long-range rockets capable of reaching northern Israel.
It says the site, in the Bureij urban refugee camp, was connected by several tunnels as deep as 30 meters (100 feet) underground and included production facilities for long-range rockets, mortar shells, explosives, and drones.
Videos released by the army Monday showed at least a dozen molds for manufacturing rocket parts, a melting furnace, and seven rockets with a range of at least 100 kilometers (60 miles).
It says the facility included elevators that led to a tunnel network that allowed Hamas to transport the weapons to units across the Gaza Strip. Parts of the tunnels featured tiled floors, fire extinguishers, a kitchen, workshop, and supplies.
The army says the facility is the largest weapons production site found in the war so far.
Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into Israel during three months of fighting. Some have reached as far away as Tel Aviv, some 70 kilometers (50 miles) away, but most have been fired at communities in southern Israel near the Gaza border.
CAIRO — The head of the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has traveled to Cairo for a meeting with Egypt’s president to discuss ways to end the war in Gaza.
Egypt has acted as a key peace broker in past conflicts between Israel and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the two leaders have called for an immediate cease-fire.
Monday’s talks between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi focused on Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza and the surging violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, according to a statement released by Egypt’s presidential office.
No other significant details about their discussions were made public.
In December, Egypt unveiled a plan to end the war that included an initial cease-fire agreement and then working with all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to establish a coalition government of Palestinian experts that would govern Gaza and the West Bank.
Abbas’ Palestinian Authority has not had any political power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, when Hamas seized control after winning Palestinian elections there a year earlier. Abbas himself is unpopular among Palestinians.
Israel hasn’t publicly reacted to the proposal, but has said it will not agree to any solution that involves a role for Hamas or Abbas.
BEIRUT — An Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon on Monday killed a senior commander of the militant group Hezbollah, a Lebanese security official said.
The targeted killing of Wissam al-Tawil comes as clashes between Iran-backed Hezbollah militants and the Israeli military along the Lebanon-Israel border have intensified. The strike took place less than a week after an apparent Israeli strike in the Lebanese capital of Beirut killed Hamas’ No. 2 political leader. Two days later, Hezbollah launched a wide-ranging missile attack on an Israeli military base in Mount Meron in north Israel in retaliation.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strike Monday. It said fighter jets have targeted Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
The Lebanese security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said that Israel struck a commander from Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Forces. Hezbollah identified him as al-Tawil. The strike hit a Honda SUV in the southern village of Khirbet Selm, while he was driving it, the official said.
In the decades-old standoff pitting the U.S. and Israel against Iran and allied militant groups, there are fears that any party could trigger a wider war.
— By Associated Press writer Kareem Chehayeb in Beirut.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel’s Justice Ministry says former Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak will serve as a judge at the International Court of Justice, joining a panel that will hear South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.
Barak, an influential Israeli jurist with international renown, is at the center of a national divide in Israel over the power of the courts. Critics, including from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, say he is an overly activist judge who in the 1990s spearheaded legal changes that granted courts more sway. Opponents of Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary see Barak as a champion of democracy and liberal values.
Israel and South Africa are both entitled to send judges to sit alongside the regular 15-judge panel, according to Israeli international law expert Robbie Sabel. Israel will have British international law expert Malcolm Shaw as part of its defense team, the Justice Ministry also said Monday.
Barak, 87, is a Holocaust survivor. He will be among the judges deciding whether to issue an interim order demanding Israel halt its war. Such orders are legally binding but not always enforceable.
The court this week will begin hearing South Africa’s allegations against Israel that it is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel says it is acting in self-defense after hundreds of Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 250 people hostage during its attack on Oct. 7.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister says Israel must resettle the Gaza Strip, saying that otherwise the country will need to contend with “2 million Nazis who want to annihilate us.”
Bezalel Smotrich, a champion of West Bank Jewish settlements, has repeatedly made inflammatory remarks about Israel’s post-war intentions in Gaza. He recently sparked an international outcry over his comments calling for Palestinians in Gaza to leave the territory.
He and other far-right Cabinet ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have used the war against Hamas to promote their view that Israel should resettle Gaza, from where it withdrew troops and several thousand civilians in 2005.
Speaking late Sunday to a conservative television station, Smotrich said Israel must reestablish a Jewish presence in the coastal enclave because “if we won’t be there and there will be 2 million Nazis who want to annihilate us every morning when they wake up, we won’t exist, period.”
He said Israel would face more militant attacks like Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault without Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. Israeli settlements in Gaza, which were established in the 1967 Mideast war, also faced attacks by militants.
