Deadly Israeli strikes yesterday hit Lebanon and Gaza as the US secretary of state was set to visit Israel aiming to finalize a Gaza truce agreement that diplomats say could avert a wider regional conflagration.
The Lebanese Ministry of Public Health said an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed 10 people, including a Syrian woman and her two children.
The strike was among the deadliest in southern Lebanon since the onset of near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah following the start of the Gaza war in October last year.
Photo: Reuters
Israel’s military said it struck a Hezbollah weapons storage facility.
In Hamas-run Gaza, civil defense rescuers said an Israeli airstrike killed 15 people from a single Palestinian family. The fatalities in al-Zawaida helped push the Gaza health ministry’s war death toll to 40,074.
“We are in the morgue seeing indescribable scenes of limbs and severed heads and children who are dismembered,” said Omar al-Dreemli, a relative.
On Friday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported Gaza’s first polio case in 25 years.
An unvaccinated 10-month-old child in Gaza was on Friday diagnosed with highly infectious polio, the ministry said.
The announcement came hours after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for two seven-day breaks in the Gaza war to vaccinate more than 640,000 children against type 2 poliovirus, which was first detected in the territory’s wastewater in June.
“We are closer than we have ever been” to a ceasefire in the Gaza war, US President Joe Biden said on Friday, although previous optimism during months of on-off talks has so far proven futile.
Yesterday, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said that Biden’s comment was an “illusion.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was yesterday to leave for Israel and seek to “conclude the agreement for a ceasefire and release of hostages and detainees,” the US Department of State said.
With a deal “now in sight, no one in the region should take actions to undermine this process,” Biden said.
On Friday, officials said that Hamas would not accept “new conditions” from Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Tuesday had detailed its conditions for a truce, including “a veto on certain prisoners” being released from its jails.
Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi, a Western ally, blamed Netanyahu for “impeding attempts to finalize” a deal and urged pressure on him.
Netanyahu has denied being the obstacle to a deal, blaming Hamas.
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