Middle East crisis live: six killed in Israeli strike on medical centre in central Beirut, Lebanon officials say

Iran has warned Washington that a large Israeli strike will lead to attacks on Israeli infrastructure and any country that aids such an attack will be deemed an Iranian target.

In a statement issued by Iran’s mission at the UN in New York, Iran said:

Should any country render assistance to the aggressor, it shall likewise be deemed an accomplice and a legitimate target. We advise countries to refrain from entangling themselves in the conflict between the Israeli regime and Iran and to distance themselves from the fray.

Iran also stressed no messages to “aggressors” will be sent except through the Swiss diplomats, the country designated to transmit Iranian messsages to the US. There had been claims that Iran was using Qatar as an intermediary with the US.

The Israeli army said its forces rescued an Iraqi Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by Islamic State (IS) militants and held captive in Gaza.

Fawzia Amin Sido, 21, was reunited with her family in northern Iraq on Wednesday, according to Iraqi authorities. She was freed in a months-long secret operation that involved Israel, the US and Iraq, officials said.

Iraqi officials had been in contact with her for months and passed on her information to US officials, who arranged for her exit from Gaza with the help of Israel, a source told Reuters. Iraq and Israel do not have any diplomatic ties.

The rescue operation involved several attempts that failed due to the difficult security situation resulting from Israel’s war in Gaza, Silwan Sinjaree, chief of staff of Iraq’s foreign minister, told the news agency.

According to the Israeli army, Sido was abducted by IS militants when she was 11 and sold and kidnapped to Gaza. The Israeli military said that her captor, a Palestinian who belonged to Hamas, was killed during the Gaza war, apparently by an Israeli airstrike.

The Israeli military said it had coordinated with the US embassy in Jerusalem and “other international actors” in the operation to free Sido. A US state department spokesperson said the US on Tuesday “helped to safely evacuate from Gaza a young Yezidi woman to be reunited with her family in Iraq”.

More than 6,000 Yazidis were captured by IS militants from Sinjar region in Iraq in 2014, with many sold into sexual slavery or trained as child soldiers and taken across borders, including to Turkey and Syria.

More than 3,500 have been rescued or freed, according to Iraqi authorities. Some 2,600 are still missing, many feared dead.

Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president, was in Doha, Qatar for a wider conference, but his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, held talks both with foreign ministers from the six state Gulf Cooperation Council and with the Saudi foreign minister on the sidelines of the summit.

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said:

We intend to close the book on disagreements with Iran forever and develop relations between us like two friends.

His remarks underline recent Saudi assurances that there will be no Saudi-Israel normalisation deal without Israel’s agreement to a Palestinian state.

But the Gulf states will be concerned by reports, apparently confirmed by Joe Biden, that Israel is in discussions with the US whether it may target Iran oil installations, a move that could have a knock on effect on oil exports throughout the region.

In a joint press conference with Pezeshkian, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, said the crisis in the Middle East is a “collective genocide” and that his country has always warned of Israel’s “impunity.”

It has become crystal clear that what is happening is genocide, in addition to turning the Gaza Strip into an area unfit for human habitation, in preparation for displacement.

Pezeshkian said Iran had been forced to react due to Israel’s behaviour. He said:

Since I was elected as the president, I have been trying to say that we are looking for peace and tranquility, because no country or region can develop with war.

He restated his grievance that he had been misled when he agreed not to respond to the assassination of Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in June due to claims that Israel was close to signing a Gaza peace deal.

The broad hints of an Iranian counter-escalation especially if its nuclear sites are struck raise issues of whether Iran would be willing to hit what it regards as Israel’s most sensititve nuclear sites.

The warnings came as the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, sought assurances from Gulf States in Doha that they would remain neutral in the event of any joint Israeli-US attack in Iran.

Majid Takht-Ravanchi, the political deputy at Iran’s ministry of foreign affairs, also held a briefing with international diplomats in Tehran to warn them if Israel challenged Iranian sovereignty again, Israel will receive “a crushing and instructive response”.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will lead Friday prayers in Tehran while his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, will travel to Beirut to discuss if there is any possibility of reviving a ceasefire.

Iran struck Israeli military bases on Tuesday in response to the killing of the Hezbollah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut on Friday, and Israel has vowed a response.

Iran has warned Washington that a large Israeli strike will lead to attacks on Israeli infrastructure and any country that aids such an attack will be deemed an Iranian target.

In a statement issued by Iran’s mission at the UN in New York, Iran said:

Should any country render assistance to the aggressor, it shall likewise be deemed an accomplice and a legitimate target. We advise countries to refrain from entangling themselves in the conflict between the Israeli regime and Iran and to distance themselves from the fray.

Iran also stressed no messages to “aggressors” will be sent except through the Swiss diplomats, the country designated to transmit Iranian messsages to the US. There had been claims that Iran was using Qatar as an intermediary with the US.

The Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, affirmed his country’s “full support” for Lebanon against the “brutal attacks they are being subjected to”.

Posting to X on Thursday, he said he had ordered “rapid action and all necessary resources” to provide humanitarian and relief support to “all displaced people and those affected by this aggression.” He added:

The failure of the international community to stop the war on Gaza was a green light to expand the conflict.

Among the favourites for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize are the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), the international court of justice (ICJ), and the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, according to a report.

In a year marked by the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, the Norwegian Nobel Committee may want to focus on humanitarian actors helping to relieve civilian suffering. Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, told Reuters:

Unrwa could be one such candidate. They’re doing extremely important work for civilian Palestinians that experience the sufferings of the war in Gaza.

The UN’s chief or its top court, the ICJ, are other possible contenders, Asle Sveen, a historian of the Nobel Peace Prize, told the news agency.

Guterres is the top symbol of the UN. The ICJ’s most important duty is to ensure that international humanitarian law is applied globally.

The head of the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) said three of the UN body’s schools were hit in Gaza in the past two days alone, killing at least 21 people.

Israeli forces stepped up their attacks on the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday, killing at least 70 people in strikes on a school and an orphanage sheltering displaced people, according to Palestinian media and officials.

At least 51 people were killed and 82 wounded in an Israeli attack in Khan Younis that began early on Wednesday, Gaza’s health ministry said. Records at the European hospital show that seven women and 12 children, as young as 22 months old, were among those killed.

Another 23 people, including two children, were killed in separate strikes across Gaza, according to local hospitals.

Unrwa chief Philippe Lazzarini said that the three schools that were attacked over the past two days housed more than 20,000 displaced people.

He said that more than 140 Unrwa schools have come under attacks since 7 October, the majority of them “while people were taking refuge in them under the UN flag”. Lazzarini added:

Schools used to be a safe haven for learning, they have now turned into hell for far too many. Schools cannot be used for any military purposes by anyone. Schools are not a target. These are some of the basic rules of war blatantly disregarded.

The latest figures by the Gaza health ministry state that at least 41,788 people have been killed and 96,794 others wounded in Israeli strikes since 7 October.

Gulf Arab states have sought to reassure Iran of their neutrality amid rising concerns that a wider escalation in violence between Tehran and Israel could threaten their oil facilities, according to a report.

Ministers from Gulf Arab states and Iran attended a meeting of Asian nations hosted by Qatar this week, during which urgent de-escalation was at the top of the agenda for all the discussions, sources told Reuters.

Axios reported yesterday that Israeli officials are considering targeting oil production facilities inside Iran and other strategic sites as a retaliation to Tuesday’s missile attack.

Iran has not threatened to attack Gulf oil facilities but it has warned that if “Israel supporters” intervene directly their interests in the region would be targeted. Ali Shihabi, a Saudi commentator close to the Royal Court, told Reuters:

The Gulf states think it’s unlikely that Iran will strike their oil facilities, but the Iranians are dropping hints they might from unofficial sources. It’s a tool the Iranians have against the U.S. and the global economy.

The message from the Gulf Cooperation Council – made up of the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait – to Iran is “please de-escalate”, he said.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it killed a Hezbollah commander who was responsible for a rocket attack on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 children and teenagers on a football field in July.

The IDF said Khader Shahabiya was killed in an airstrike on Wednesday. It said he was responsible for the rocket attack in July, as well as numerous anti-tank missile and rocket attacks on IDF posts.

The attack on Majdal Shams village, a predominantly Druze village, killed 12 children between the ages of 10 and 16 as they were playing football and wounded dozens more.

Joe Biden’s latest comments came a day after the US president said he would not support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

US officials have been locked in urgent talks with their Israeli counterparts on their country’s response since Iran’s missile attack on Tuesday.

There is general acceptance in Washington that Israel will carry out a military response that would almost certain to go further than the only previous Israeli airstrikes against Iran, when missiles were fired at an air defence installation near Isfahan, after a previous Iranian aerial attack in April this year.

But the Biden administration fears that a major Israeli response, particularly one targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, could trigger further escalation that could ultimately draw in US forces, and potentially lead to an Iranian decision to try to build nuclear weapons.

Second only to nuclear sites in terms of their devastating impact would be a broad attack on Iran’s oil installations, as well as airstrikes on military bases, or targeted assassinations, which Israel has used widely in the region.

Here’s more from Joe Biden, who was speaking to reporters at the White House when he was asked if he would “allow” Israel to retaliate against Iran. The US president said:

First of all, we don’t ’allow’ Israel, we advise Israel. And there is nothing going to happen today.

Joe Biden, the US president, said he was “discussing” possible Israeli strikes on Iranian oil sites in response to Tehran’s missile attack on Tuesday.

Here’s a clip, from the BBC’s Faisal Islam:

As Islam notes, Biden’s comments quickly sent oil prices soaring.

WTI, the US contract, rose by as much as 5% before paring back some gains to sit at about $73 per barrel while Brent, the international benchmark, rose around four percent to $76.81, AFP reported.

Here’s more from the World Health Organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was speaking during an online briefing on Thursday.

At least 28 on-duty medics have been killed in the past 24 hours in Lebanon, he said. A total of nearly 2,000 people have been killed, including 127 children, and 9,384 injured since the start of Israeli attacks on Lebanon over the last year, the country’s health ministry said.

WHO’s representative in Lebanon, Dr Abdinasir Abubakar, said all of the healthcare workers killed in the past day had been on duty, helping with the wounded, Reuters reported. He added:

Hospitals have been already evacuated. I think what I can say for now is the capacity for mass casualty management exists, but it’s just a matter of time until the system actually reaches its limit.

Tedros called for stronger protections for health workers:

Many (other) health workers are not reporting to duty and fled the areas where they work due to bombardments … This is severely limiting the provision of mass trauma management and continuity of health services.

The UN health agency will not be able to deliver a large planned shipment of trauma and medical supplies to the country on Friday due to flight restrictions, he added.

WHO’s representative in Lebanon Dr Abdinasir Abubakar told the media briefing that all of the healthcare workers killed in the past day had been on duty, helping with the injured.

As we reported in an earlier post, a total of nearly 2,000 people have been killed, including 127 children, and 9,384 injured since the start of Israeli attacks on Lebanon over the last year, the country’s health ministry said.

 

Updated: Oktober 3, 2024 — 8:21 am

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