Israeli air strikes targeted Gaza on Wednesday, ahead of ceasefire talks that the US hopes will deter Iran from attacking Israel in retaliation for the killing of a Hamas leader.
Iran and its allies blame Israel for the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh during President Masoud Pezeshkian’s swearing-in ceremony in Tehran on July 31. Israel has not commented on the incident.
Western countries have urged Iran to withdraw its threat to avenge his death, hours after an Israeli strike in Beirut killed a senior commander of Lebanon’s powerful Iran-backed rebel group Hezbollah.
The escalation has raised fears of a wider conflict after more than 10 months of war in Gaza that has killed nearly 40,000 people, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.
So far there has been only one week-long ceasefire in the fighting in Gaza, in November, when dozens of hostages in Gaza were released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
Ahead of Thursday’s ceasefire talks, a Hamas official said the Islamist movement was “continuing consultations with mediators.”
“Hamas really wants an end to the war and a ceasefire agreement based on the (Biden) plan,” another Hamas official said, referring to the proposal put forward by US President Joe Biden on May 31.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday detailed his conditions for a ceasefire, including a “veto on the release of certain prisoners” from prisons.
Biden said on Tuesday that the Gaza ceasefire deal could deter Iran from attacking Israel.
Asked if a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas could prevent an Iranian attack, Biden said: “That’s my hope”. He said that although negotiations are “getting tough”, he is “not giving up”.
His envoy for the conflict, Amos Hochstein, was in Beirut on Wednesday, where he warned that the time was drawing near for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“There is no time to waste any more and no party has any legitimate excuse for any further delay,” he said after talks with Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri.
Iran has rejected Western calls for restraint. Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said the demand “clearly calls on Iran not to take any preventive action against a regime that has violated its sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Israel on ‘high alert’
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on social media platform X that the country was still on “high alert”.
“I want to express my appreciation and thanks to our allies who stand united with us in the face of the hateful threats of the Iranian regime and its terrorist organizations,” he said.
This rising tension has prompted Western governments to issue advisories against travel to Lebanon, as well as draw up contingency plans to evacuate their citizens from the region in case a full-scale war breaks out.
A boat anchored near Limassol, Cyprus, is on standby to provide assistance “in the event of an evacuation of people from the conflict zone,” a spokesman for the boat’s charterer said.
Fearing attacks by Iran and Hezbollah, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art said it had hidden its most valuable artworks, including paintings by Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt.
“In the last three, four, five days, when this new threat from Hezbollah and Iran emerged again, we realized we needed to take other precautions,” museum director Tania Koen-Ujjili said.
The Biden administration on Tuesday approved the sale of more than $20 billion in new weapons to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets.
The United States has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group and a guided missile submarine to the region in support of Israel.
The death toll in Gaza nears 40,000
The Gaza war began with a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in the deaths of 1,198 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli official figures compiled by AFP.
Hamas also captured 251 people, 111 of whom are still being held in Gaza, 39 of whom the military says are dead.
At least 39,965 people have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza, according to the latest count by Israel’s Health Ministry, although the ministry did not provide a breakdown of civilian and Hamas deaths.
In the latest violence, the Israeli military said it carried out dozens of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
It said its troops were “continuing precise, intelligence-based operational activity in the Tel al-Sultan area” in the southern city of Rafah.
The army said it had struck “more than 40” sites in Gaza in the past 24 hours, including structures from which Hamas had fired anti-tank missiles.
The Gaza Civil Defense Agency said its emergency teams pulled the bodies of four members of the same family from the rubble of a bombed-out apartment in the Qatar-built Hamad residential complex near Khan Younis.
Residents of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza said the camp was hit by a missile attack just after midnight.
“We were sleeping… and we were taken by surprise when missiles were fired targeting our neighbours, children, their parents and fathers,” Jihad al-Sharif told AFPTV.
“The explosion was terrible,” he said, adding that when his family came out they saw the remains of children lying in the middle of the street.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
