Hezbollah, Israel appear to signal no desire to spread Gaza war

FE Team | Published: January 04, 2024 21:15:08

BEIRUT, Jan 04 (Reuters/AFP/BBC): Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Israeli army made statements suggesting the two avowed enemies wanted to avoid risking the further spread of war beyond the Gaza Strip after a drone strike killed a Palestinian Hamas deputy leader in Beirut.
In a speech in Beirut on Wednesday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed that his powerful Iran-backed Shi'ite militia "cannot be silent" following the killing of Hamas deputy Saleh al-Arouri on Tuesday.
Nasrallah said his heavily armed forces would fight to the finish if Israel chose to extend the war to Lebanon, but he made no concrete threats to act against Israel in support of Hamas, Hezbollah's ally also backed by Iran.
Israel neither confirmed nor denied assassinating Arouri but has promised to annihilate Hamas, which rules Gaza, following the group's Oct 7 cross-border assault in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed and some 240 abducted.
Israeli bombing kills dozens of
people overnight in Gaza
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 centre 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".
UN 'very disturbed' by Israeli
calls for Gazans' emigration
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday he was "very disturbed" after comments by senior Israeli officials calling for Palestinians to leave Gaza.
"Very disturbed by high-level Israeli officials' statements on plans to transfer civilians from Gaza to third countries," Turk wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
US edn official resigns over
Biden's Israel-Gaza policy
A senior official in the US Education Department stepped down on Wednesday, citing President Joe Biden's handling of the conflict in Gaza, the latest sign of dissent in the administration as deaths continue to grow in the war.
Also on Wednesday, 17 Biden re-election campaign staffers issued a warning in an anonymous letter that Biden could lose voters over the issue.
Tariq Habash, special assistant in the Education Department's Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, said: "I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives, in what leading human rights experts have called a genocidal campaign by the Israeli government."
Habash, a Palestinian-American and an expert on student debt, was appointed early in Biden's presidency as part of a build-out of the Education Department's student loan expertise.
The 17 anonymous Biden re-election campaign staffers, in their letter, published on Medium, urged Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
"Biden for President staff have seen volunteers quit in droves, and people who have voted blue for decades feel uncertain about doing so for the first time ever, because of this conflict," the staffers wrote in the letter.
Biden's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.