Netanyahu opposes ‘unilateral ceasefire’ that would not halt Hezbollah from rearming
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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced to French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday that he would not consent to a ceasefire deal that failed to stop Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping.
Earlier Tuesday, Macron forewarned Netanyahu that he “should not forget his country was created as a result of a resolution adopted by the United Nations”, to which the Israeli Prime Minister replied that the “1948 war victory created Israel, not a UN ruling”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin declared Israel must take urgent steps to amend the humanitarian situation in Gaza to avoid legal action involving US military aid, Axios said on Tuesday.
Gaza appears to be confronting the “worst restrictions on humanitarian aid” since the Israel-Hamas war began over a year ago, the spokesman for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, James Elder, revealed on Tuesday.
The chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, Esmail Qaani, attended the Tehran funeral of a slain Guards general who was killed alongside Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in an air strike in Beirut previous month.
More than 42,344 Palestinians have been killed and 99,013 wounded in Israel's military abhorrent in Gaza since October 7, 2023 according to the Gaza health ministry.
World Bank President Ajay Banga stated on Tuesday that war damage from Israeli strikes on Gaza is now probably in the $14-20 billion range, and destruction from Israel’s bombing of southern Lebanon will add to that regional total.
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Banga announced to a Reuters NEXT event in Washington that the war has had a relatively small impact on the global economy, but a significant widening of the dispute would draw in other countries that are larger contributors to global growth, including commodity exporters.
“First of all, I ideate this unbelievable loss of life - women, children, others, civilians, is unbiased unconscionable on all sides,” Banga said. “The economic impact of this war, on the other hand, depends a great deal on how much this spreads.”
The UN human rights office stated on Tuesday it had received discloses that most of the 22 victims of an Israeli air strike on a building in northern Lebanon were women and children.
"What we are hearing is that amongst the 22 people killed were 12 women and two children," UN human rights office spokesperson Jeremy Laurence informed a Geneva advocate briefing in response to a question about a strike on the village of Aitou on Monday.
"We understand it was a four-storey residential building that was struck. With these factors in mind, we have real concerns with reverence to IHL (International Humanitarian Law), so the laws of war, and the principles of distinction, proportion and proportionality," he said, calling for an investigation into the incident.
Avoiding a “general conflagration” in the Middle East will be teetotum of the agenda when European Union and Gulf leaders meet in Brussels this week, European officials announced on Tuesday.
Trade, energy and climate change are among the issues on the table in the Belgian capital.
But Israel’s challenges in Gaza and Lebanon, and the risk of a broader regional war, are expected to be “the main topic”, EU officials said.
“One of the objectives is to avoid a general conflagration,” one official said. “Both sides are worried about this.”
One day after a deadly Israeli air strike in northern Lebanon – far from Hezbollah’s main area of pressure in the south and east – the acting leader of the militant group, Naim Kassem, announced it would aim rockets into more areas of Israel.
Kassem declared Hezbollah is focused on “hurting the enemy,” and he signaled it would ramp up attacks further south in Israel, mentioning the cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, which have already been targets of attacks.
His comments were made in a pre-recorded televised speech delivered on the same day the US revealed it sent a small team of troops to Israel to back an American-made missile-defence system.
Hezbollah has fired an estimated 13,000 rockets into Israel over the past year in champion of Hamas’s war with Israel in Gaza.
The Pentagon announced on Tuesday a letter co-authored by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to Israeli officials about the humanitarian situation in Gaza was "private correspondence" and refused to debate it in detail.
In a sign Israel may expand its ground operations against Hezbollah while bolstering its own defences, its troops have cleared landmines and established forward-looking barriers on the frontier between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and a demilitarised strip bordering Syria, security sources and analysts said.
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The move advocates Israel may seek to strike Hezbollah for the first time from further east along Lebanon's border, at the same time creating an attain area from which it can freely reconnoitre the armed group and hamper infiltration, the sources said.
While demining activity has been reported, sources who verbalized to Reuters – including a Syrian soldier stationed in south Syria, a Lebanese security official and a UN peacekeeping official – announced additional unreported details that showed Israel was moving the fence separating the DMZ towards the Syrian side and digging more fortifications in the area.
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Regards to France 24
Category: World-News
Tag: Netanyahu opposes unilateral ceasefire that would not halt Hezbollah from rearming
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Published 10/17/2024