Israeli bombing killed dozens of people overnight Wednesday in Gaza as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepares to head to the Middle East amid surging regional tensions.
Israeli bombing killed dozens of people overnight in Gaza, the health ministry of the Hamas-run Palestinian territory said Thursday, as regional tensions have surged over the almost three-months-old war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was due to head to the Middle East, a US official said on condition of anonymity, the top diplomat’s fourth trip to the region since the Hamas attack of October 7 triggered the bloodiest ever Gaza war.
The Israeli military, in its campaign to destroy the Islamist militant group, has reported more strikes in and around Gaza City, now a largely devastated urban combat zone, and Khan Yunis, the biggest urban center in the besieged territory’s south.
The Gaza health ministry reported “dozens of martyrs and more than 100 wounded in the continued barbaric aerial and artillery bombardment of citizens’ homes in the Gaza Strip”.
Tensions have also surged with Israel’s northern neighbor Lebanon, where a strike in Beirut on Tuesday, widely assumed to have been carried out by Israel, killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh el-Arouri, who was set to be buried Thursday.
Arouri was killed in the south Beirut stronghold of the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which has traded tit-for-tat fire across the border with Israel for months, while both sides have avoided full-scale war.
Hezbollah has vowed that the killing of Arouri and six other Hamas operatives on its home turf will not go unpunished, labelling it “a serious assault on Lebanon.”
Mossad chief David Barnea warned on Wednesday that the Israeli spy agency “is committed to settling the score with the murderers” who carried out the Hamas attack.
The United Nations estimates 1.9 million Gazans are displaced, and the World Health Organization has warned of the risk of famine and disease, with only a minimal amount of aid entering the territory.
Regional tensions rose further after twin bomb blasts in Iran on Wednesday killed 84 people, according to a revised death toll, near the grave of Revolutionary Guards general Qasem Soleimani, who died in a 2020 US strike in Baghdad.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blamed “evil and criminal enemies of the Iranian nation” and said: “This disaster will have a harsh response, God willing.”
While some Iranian officials pointed blame at Tehran’s long-time arch foes the United States and Israel, Washington rejected suggestions of either nation’s involvement and an Israeli military spokesman declined to comment.
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called the idea of US involvement “ridiculous” and said Washington had “no reason to believe that Israel was involved” either.
Miller echoed the fears of many across the Middle East about an expansion of the Israel-Hamas war.
“It is in no one’s interest — not in the interest of any country in the region, not in the interest of any country in the world — to see this conflict escalated any further than it already is,” Miller said.
With AFP
