Hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday openly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."
"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world," the president told a conference in Tehran entitled "The World without Zionism."
"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land," he said.
"As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map," said Ahmadinejad, referring to Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
His comments were the first time in years that such a high-ranking Iranian official has called for Israel's eradication, even though such slogans are still regularly used at regime rallies.
Suicide Bomb
In Israel, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a market in the coastal city of Hadera yesterday, killing at least four people and wounding dozens, officials said.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing and said the attack was to avenge Israel's killing of a senior leader in the West Bank on Monday, Israel's Channel 10 television said.
The bombing occurred at a sandwich stand in Hadera, a coastal town which has been a frequent target of attacks in a 5-year-old Palestinian uprising.
It was the first bombing inside Israel since Aug. 28, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to Beersheba's central bus station, wounding 20.
Earlier in the day, Israeli warplanes and artillery pounded an area of northern Gaza yesterday in response to Palestinian militants firing a rocket into Israel's southern town of Sderot.
No casualties were reported in any of the incidents, part of a flare-up of violence this week that has been one of the worst since Israel quit the Gaza Strip last month.
The violence has threatened to unravel an eight-month-old ceasefire and has cast a shadow over hopes of a revival of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking since the Jewish state withdrew from Gaza after 38 years of occupation.
After a lull in violence for much of Tuesday, militants fired two rockets at Israel from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza yesterday, witnesses said. An Israeli military source said the remains of one rocket were found near a Sderot college.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' ruling Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the rocket attack. Abbas had condemned earlier rocket attacks by militants.
About two hours after Sderot was hit, the Israeli military said it had sent warplanes to carry out a bombing raid against a rocket launchpad in northern Gaza.
Hamas
Also yesterday, Hamas said it will not support a truce with Israel beyond this year if Palestinian parliamentry elections are postponed, a leader of the Islamic militant group suggested in remarks published yesterday.
Abbas reached the ceasefire deal with Hamas and other factions in February, and in exchange promised them political participation, including the elections.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS