Region

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel's army said Hizbollah fired around 160 projectiles into its territory from Lebanon on Sunday, with group saying its attacks had targeted the Tel Aviv area and Israel's south.

The Iran-backed group said in a statement that it had "launched, for the first time, an aerial attack using a swarm of attack drones on the Ashdod naval base" in southern Israel.

Later, it said it fired "a barrage of advanced missiles and a swarm of attack drones" at a "military target" in Tel Aviv, and had also launched a volley of missiles at the Glilot army intelligence base in the city's suburbs.

The Israeli military did not comment on the specific attack claims when contacted by AFP.

But it said earlier that air raid sirens had sounded in several locations in central and northern Israel, including in the greater Tel Aviv suburbs.

It later reported that "approximately 160 projectiles that were fired by the Hizbollah terrorist organisation have crossed from Lebanon into Israel".

Some of the projectiles were shot down.

Medical agencies reported that at least 11 people were wounded, including a man in a "moderate to serious" condition. 

AFP images from Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv, showed several damaged and burned-out cars, and a house pockmarked by shrapnel.

The wave of projectiles follows at least four deadly Israeli strikes in central Beirut in the past week, including one that killed Hizbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif.

In a speech on Wednesday, Hizbollah chief Naim Qassem had said the response to the recent strikes on the capital "must be expected on central Tel Aviv".

The Lebanese army, meanwhile, said that a soldier was killed on Sunday and 18 others injured, "including some with severe wounds, as a result of an Israeli attack targeting a Lebanese army centre in Amriyeh".

Though the Lebanese army is not a party to the war between Israel and Hizbollah, Israeli strikes have killed 19 Lebanese soldiers in the last two months, authorities have said.

Since September 23, Israel has intensified its Lebanon air campaign, later sending in ground troops after nearly a year of limited exchanges of fire initiated by Hizbollah in support of its ally Hamas after the Palestinian group's October 7, 2023 attack, which sparked the Gaza war.

Lebanon's health ministry says at least 3,670 people have been killed in the country since October 2023, most of them since September this year.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — An Israeli air strike in central Beirut killed at least four people early Saturday, bringing down a residential building and jolting residents across the city out of bed as Israel kept up its air campaign against Hizbollah.

The attack was followed by others in the city's southern suburbs after calls by Israel's military to evacuate the area.

Rescue operations were underway at the site of the first strike on Saturday morning, with an excavator removing the rubble of the eight-storey building, and a fire truck and civil defence rescuers stationed nearby as people gathered around the site.

"The strike was so strong it felt like the building was about to fall on our heads," said Samir, 60, who lives in a building facing the one that was destroyed.

He said he fled his home in the middle of the night with his wife and children.

"We saw two dead people on the ground... The children started crying and their mother cried even more," he told AFP.

Lebanon's National News Agency reported that Beirut "woke up to a horrific massacre", after Israeli jets hit the building in the working-class Basta neighbourhood.

The NNA said Israeli jets had launched six missiles at the structure, causing "widespread destruction in buildings" nearby.

The strike "killed four people and injured 23 others", Lebanon's health ministry said in a statement, giving a preliminary toll. 

The predawn attack in Basta was not preceded by an evacuation warning from Israel's military. Similar strikes carried out without warning outside of Hizbollah's traditional bastions have tended to target high-level members.

Israel declined to comment on the strike, while Hizbollah had yet to mention it.

The second strike hit the neighbourhood of Hadath in Beirut's southern suburbs, which are a stronghold of Hizbollah. 

Israel stepped up its campaign against the Iran-backed group in late September, targeting areas where it holds sway in the country's east, south and south Beirut, and later sending in ground troops after nearly a year of limited cross-border exchanges of fire.

Lebanon's health ministry says at least 3,645 people have been killed since October 2023, when Hizbollah initiated cross-border clashes with Israel in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas over the Gaza war. Most of the deaths have been since September this year.

GAZA STRIP — The health ministry in Gaza said Friday that hospitals have only two days' fuel left before they must restrict services, after the UN warned aid delivery to the war-devastated territory is being crippled.

The warning came a day after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant more than a year into the Gaza war.

The United Nations and others have repeatedly decried humanitarian conditions, particularly in northern Gaza.

Gaza medics said an overnight Israeli raid on the cities of Beit Lahia and nearby Jabalia resulted in dozens killed or missing.

Marwan Al Hams, director of Gaza's field hospitals, told reporters all hospitals in the Palestinian territory "will stop working or reduce their services within 48 hours due to the occupation's [Israel's] obstruction of fuel entry".

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was "deeply concerned about the safety and well-being of 80 patients, including 8 in the intensive care unit" at Kamal Adwan hospital, one of just two partly operating in northern Gaza.

Kamal Adwan director Hossam Abu Safia told AFP it was "deliberately hit by Israeli shelling for the second day" Friday and that "one doctor and some patients were injured".

Late Thursday, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, Muhannad Hadi, said: "The delivery of critical aid across Gaza, including food, water, fuel and medical supplies, is grinding to a halt."

He said that for more than six weeks, Israeli authorities "have been banning commercial imports" while "a surge in armed looting" has hit aid convoys.

'Absurd and false'

Vowing to stop Hamas from regrouping, Israel on October 6 began an air and ground operation in Jabalia and then expanded it to Beit Lahia.

Gaza's health ministry says the operation has killed thousands.

The UN says more than 100,000 have been displaced from the area, and an official told the Security Council last week that people "are effectively starving".

Issuing the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the Hague-based ICC said there were "reasonable grounds" to believe they bore "criminal responsibility" for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and crimes against humanity including over "the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies".

A furious Netanyahu said: "Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions and accusations made against it."

He said the judges were "driven by anti-Semitic hatred of Israel".

On Friday, he thanked his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban for inviting him to visit in defiance of the ICC warrant, which Orban branded "political".

Hungary currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

US President Joe Biden, whose country is Israel's top military supplier, called the warrants against Israeli leaders "outrageous", but other world leaders supported the court.

Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris said Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in the country.

Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday discussed efforts to reach a ceasefire in Lebanon, the White House said.

Warrant for Hamas chief

The ICC also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, saying it had grounds to suspect him of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the attacks on Israel that sparked the war, including "sexual and gender-based violence" against hostages.

Israel said it killed Deif in July, but Hamas has not confirmed his death.

On Thursday, a UN representative said an Israeli raid on Palmyra in Syria this week was "likely the deadliest" by Israel on the country so far. On Friday, a war monitor said the strikes killed 92 pro-Iran fighters.

Israel again bombed Gaza on Friday. In Gaza City, just south of Jabalia, one man who said he took his cousins to hospital after a strike urged "the world... to put an end" to the war.

Belal, who gave only his first name, said 10 members of his family had been killed.

At least 44,056 people have been killed in Gaza during more than 13 months of war, most of them civilians, according to figures from Gaza's health ministry which the United Nations considers reliable.

GAZA STRIP — Dozens were killed or unaccounted for in Gaza on Thursday after Israeli strikes, on the day the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war.

With warrants also issued for Netanyahu's former defence minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas's military chief, all three men face accusations of crimes against humanity and war crimes in the conflict sparked by the October 7 attack.

One strike near the Kamal Adwan hospital in the north of the territory left "dozens of people" dead or missing, the facility's director Hossam Abu Safiya told AFP.

Another strike was reported in a neighbourhood of Gaza City, with civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal saying 22 were dead.

"There is a headless body. We don't yet know who this is," Moataz al-Arouqi, who lives in the area, told AFP.

Since Hamas conducted the October 7, 2023 attack, the deadliest in Israeli history, Israel has been fighting a war in Gaza, which the militant group rules.

It vows to crush Hamas and to bring home the hostages seized by the group during the attack.

Israel has faced growing international criticism over its conduct of the Gaza war, including from its allies, despite global solidarity with the victims of October 7.

The ICC's move now theoretically limits the movement of Netanyahu as any of the court's 124 national members would be obliged to arrest him on their territory.

An arrest warrant has also been issued for Gallant, whom Netanyahu sacked as defence minister on November 5, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif.

In August Israel said it had killed Deif in Gaza the previous month. Hamas has not confirmed his death.

The arrest warrants prompted swift and strong condemnation from Israel, with Netanyahu branding the decision "anti-Semitic" and comparing it to a "modern-day Dreyfus trial".

He was referring to the 19th century Alfred Dreyfus affair in which a French Jewish army captain was wrongly convicted of treason.

Hamas on the other hand hailed the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, calling the decision an "important step towards justice". It did not mention the warrant for Deif.

Lebanon front 

Israel is also fighting Hamas ally Hizbollah in Lebanon. Both groups are backed by Israel's arch-foe Iran.

On Thursday, US envoy Amos Hochstein was due to meet Netanyahu to seek a truce in the war in Lebanon.

Hochstein's meetings in Lebanon this week appeared to indicate some progress in efforts to end that war.

On the Gaza front, the United States vetoed on Wednesday a UN Security Council push for a ceasefire that Washington said would have emboldened Hamas.

The health ministry in Gaza said the death toll from the resulting war has reached 44,056 people, the majority civilians. The United Nations considers the figures reliable.

 'Freedom to act' 

Following the October 7 attack, Hizbollah began launching cross-border strikes on Israel in support of Hamas.

In September, Israel expanded the focus of its war from Gaza to Lebanon, vowing to fight Hizbollah until tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the cross-border fire are able to return home.

With Hochstein in Lebanon, Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Wednesday said that any ceasefire deal must ensure Israel still has the "freedom to act" against Hizbollah.

Hizbollah leader Naim Qassem threatened to strike Israeli commercial hub Tel Aviv in retaliation for attacks on Lebanon's capital.

"Israel cannot defeat us and cannot impose its conditions on us," Qassem said in a defiant televised address.

In Lebanon, Hochstein met with officials including parliament speaker Nabih Berri, an ally of Hizbollah.

200 children 

More than 3,558 people in Lebanon have been killed since the clashes began, Lebanese authorities have said, most since late September. 

Among them were more than 200 children, according to the United Nations.

On the Israeli side, a total of 82 Israeli soldiers and 47 civilians have died in the hostilities on the Lebanese front.

Israel has intensified strikes on neighbouring Syria, the main conduit of weapons for Hizbollah from its backer Iran.

In the latest attack, a Syria war monitor said 79 pro-Iran fighters were killed in strikes on Palmyra in the east of the country.

Those killed in Wednesday's strikes included 53 fighters from pro-Iran Syrian groups and 26 foreign fighters, mostly from Iraq as well as four from Lebanon's Hizbollah, the monitor said.

Israel rarely comments on individual strikes in Syria but has repeatedly said it will not allow Iran to expand its presence in the country. 

Strikes in Lebanon 

On Thursday, successive rounds of strikes hit the southern suburbs of Beirut, Hizbollah's main bastion, following evacuation calls by the Israeli military.

One post on X by Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee said the military targeted "terrorist command headquarters and Hizbollah military infrastructure" in the area.

Strikes also hit south Lebanon, including the border town of Khiam where Israeli troops are pushing to advance, according to Lebanon's official National News Agency.

Hizbollah claimed a series of attacks on Thursday, including one on a base near south Israel's Ashdod, its deepest so far.

On Thursday, rocket fire from Lebanon hit a playground in northern Israel, killing one man, Israeli first responders said.

Hizbollah was the only armed group in Lebanon that did not surrender its weapons following the 1975-1990 civil war.

It has maintained a formidable arsenal and holds sway not only on the battlefield but also in Lebanese politics.

HASSAN SHAMI — A decade after the Daesh terror group extremists rampaged through northern Iraq, Moaz Fadhil and his eight children finally returned to their village after languishing for years in a displacement camp.

Their home, Hassan Shami, is just a stone's throw from the tent city where they had been living, and it still bears the scars of the fight against Daesh.

The extremists seized a third of Iraq, ruling their self-declared "caliphate" with an iron fist, before an international coalition wrestled control from them in 2017.

Seven years on, many of the village's homes are still in ruins and lacking essential services, but Fadhil said he felt an "indescribable joy" upon moving back in August.

Iraq -- marred by decades of war and turmoil even before the rise of Daesh -- is home to more than a million internally displaced people.

Baghdad has been pushing for the closure of the displacement camps, with the country having attained a degree of comparative stability in recent years. 

Most of the camps in federal Iraq have now been closed, but around 20 remain in the northern autonomous Kurdistan region, which according to the United Nations house more than 115,000 displaced people.

But for many, actually returning home can be a difficult task.

After getting the green light from Kurdish security forces to leave the camp, Fadhil moved his family into a friend's damaged house because his own is a complete ruin.

 'Beautiful memories' 

"Water arrives by tanker trucks and there is no electricity," said the 53-year-old.

Although the rubble has been cleared from the structure he now lives in, the cinder block walls and rough concrete floors remain bare.

Across Hassan Shami, half-collapsed houses sit next to concrete buildings under construction by those residents who can afford to rebuild.

Some have installed solar panels to power their new lives.

A small new mosque stands, starkly white, beside an asphalt road.

"I was born here, and before me my father and mother," said Fadhil, an unemployed farmer.

"I have beautiful memories with my children, my parents."

The family survives mainly on the modest income brought in by his eldest son, who works as a day labourer on building sites.

"Every four or five days he works a day" for about $8, said Fadhil.

In an effort to close the camps and facilitate returns, Iraqi authorities are offering families around $3,000 to go back to their places of origin.

To do so, displaced people must also get security clearance -- to ensure they are not wanted for jihadist crimes -- and have their identity papers or property rights in order.

But of the 11,000 displaced people still living in six displacement camps near Hassan Shami, 600 are former prisoners, according to the UN.

They were released after serving up to five years for crimes related to membership of IS.

Not that simple 

For them, going home can mean further complications.

There's the risk of ostracism by neighbours or tribes for their perceived affiliation with Daesh atrocities, potential arrest at a checkpoint by federal forces or even a second trial.

Among them is 32-year-old Rashid, who asked that we use a pseudonym because of his previous imprisonment in Kurdistan for belonging to the extremist group.

He said he hopes the camp next to Hassan Shami does not close.

"I have a certificate of release [from prison], everything is in order... But I can't go back there", he said of federal Iraq. 

"If I go back it's 20 years" in jail, he added, worried that he would be tried again in an Iraqi court.

Ali Abbas, spokesperson for Iraq's migration ministry, said that those who committed crimes may indeed face trial after they leave the camps.

"No one can prevent justice from doing its job", he said, claiming that their families would not face repercussions.

The government is working to ensure that families who return have access to basic services, Abbas added.

In recent months, Baghdad has repeatedly tried to set deadlines for Kurdistan to close the camps, even suing leaders of the autonomous region before finally opting for cooperation over coercion.

Imrul Islam of the Norwegian Refugee Council said displacement camps by definition are supposed to be temporary, but warned against their hasty closure.

When people return, "you need schools. You need hospitals. You need roads. And you need working markets that provide opportunities for livelihoods," he said.

Without these, he said, many families who try to resettle in their home towns would end up returning to the camps.