ISRAELI attacks on Gaza City kill at least 39 today, a day after killing at least 78 Palestinians in attacks across the besieged Strip. At least 61 people have been killed in Gaza today by Israeli attacks across the enclave.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed at least 743 Palestinians in attacks at sites run by the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) since late May.
Meanwhile, the Hezbollah chief says the Lebanese group remains open to peace, but it will not disarm or back down from confronting Israel until it ends its air raids and withdraws from southern Lebanon.
“We cannot be asked to soften our stance or lay down arms while [Israeli] aggression continues,” Naim Qassem told thousands of supporters gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs on Sunday for Ashura, an important day in the Shia Muslim calendar.
Ashura commemorates the 680 AD Battle of Karbala, in which Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, was killed after he refused to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad caliphate. For Shia Muslims, the day symbolises resistance against tyranny and injustice.
The Beirut area, a Hezbollah stronghold, was draped in yellow banners and echoed with chants of resistance as Qassem delivered his speech, flanked by portraits of his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by Israel in September last year.
Israel launched a wide-scale assault on Lebanon on October 8, 2023 – a day after Palestinian group Hamas, which counts Hezbollah as an ally, stormed the Israeli territory, killing some 1,100 people and taking about 250 others captive.
The Hamas attack was immediately followed by Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. The Israeli genocidal campaign was accompanied by a brutal blockade on entry of food and medical aid, bringing the enclave’s 2.3 million residents to the brink of starvation.
Israel’s simultaneous attack on Lebanon escalated into a full-scale war by September 2024, killing more than 4,000 people, including much of Hezbollah’s top leadership, and displacing nearly 1.4 million, according to official data. A United States-brokered ceasefire nominally ended the war in November.
However, since the ceasefire, Israel has continued to occupy five strategic border points in southern Lebanon and has carried out near-daily air strikes that it says aim to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its capabilities. Those strikes have killed some 250 people and wounded 600 others since November, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.
“How can you expect us not to stand firm while the Israeli enemy continues its aggression, continues to occupy the five points, and continues to enter our territories and kill?” Qassem said in his video address.
“We will not be a part of legitimising the occupation in Lebanon and the region. We will not accept normalisation,” he added, in an apparent response to Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar saying his government was “interested” in such a move.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 57,418 people and wounded 136,261, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023, attacks, and more than 200 were taken captive.
