Region

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A source close to Hizbollah said an Israeli drone strike targeted a vehicle in eastern Lebanon Saturday, killing an official from the Iran-backed group, with tensions high between the foes.

Hizbollah has traded near daily fire with the Israeli army across Lebanon's southern border since its Palestinian ally Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, triggering the war in Gaza.

"A local Hizbollah official" was killed in an "Israeli drone" strike on a vehicle near the eastern city of Baalbek, the source close to the group said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Lebanon's official National News Agency reported one person was killed when an "enemy drone" targeted a vehicle in the Shaat area, around 15 kilometres north of Baalbek.

The area is around 100 kilometres from Lebanon’s southern border with Israel.

Recent Israeli strikes in south Lebanon have killed two senior Hizbollah commanders — one of them this week — with the Shiite Muslim movement raining rockets on northern Israel in response.

The cross-border exchanges of fire have largely been restricted to the south Lebanon-north Israel border area, although Israel has repeatedly struck deep inside eastern Lebanon.

Hizbollah earlier Saturday claimed several attacks on Israeli positions near the southern border, including one with “explosive drones” that it said came in response to “Israeli enemy attacks” on south Lebanon villages.

Hizbollah says it is acting in support of Gazans and Hamas with its attacks, which began on October 8, with the escalating violence raising fears of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, which last went to war in 2006.

The cross-border exchanges have killed at least 497 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israeli authorities say at least 16 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed on their side of the border.

TEHRAN — Iran's reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian, who advocates improved ties with the West, on Saturday won a run-off presidential election against ultraconservative Saeed Jalili, the interior ministry said.

The election came against a backdrop of heightened regional tensions because of the Gaza war, a dispute with the West over Iran's nuclear programme, and domestic discontent over the state of Iran's sanctions-hit economy.

Pezeshkian received more than 16 million votes, around 54 per cent, and Jalili more than 13 million, roughly 44 per cent, out of about 30 million votes cast, electoral authority spokesman Mohsen Eslami said.

Turnout was 49.8 per cent, Eslami added, up from a record low of about 40 per cent in the first round.

In the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini in southern Tehran, Pezeshkian gave a speech thanking his supporters, saying their votes have "given hope to a society plunged into an atmosphere of dissatisfaction".

"I did not give false promises in this election," said Pezeshkian, flanked by former foreign minister Javad Zarid. 

"I didn't say anything that I wouldn't be able to do tomorrow."

In an earlier post on X, Pezeshkian said the vote was the start of a "partnership" with Iran's people.

The death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash necessitated the election, which was not due until 2025.

Under Raisi, Iran sought improved relations with China and Russia while mending ties with Arab neighbours, chiefly Saudi Arabia, to avert deeper isolation.

Saudi Arabia led Gulf states in congratulating Pezeshkian. Both Russia and China expressed hopes for further reinforcement of ties.

Nuclear deal 

Pezeshkian is a 69-year-old heart surgeon whose only previous government experience was as health minister about two decades ago.

He has called for "constructive relations" with Western countries to "get Iran out of its isolation". 

He favours reviving the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and global powers.

Washington unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018, reimposing sanctions and leading Iran to gradually reduce commitment to its terms. The deal aimed to curb nuclear activity which Tehran maintains is for peaceful purposes.

Iran’s foe the United States on Monday said it would make no difference whether Pezeshkian or Jalili won.

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said there was no expectation the vote would “lead to a fundamental change in Iran’s direction” or improvement in human rights.

There were no obvious celebrations in Tehran on Saturday after the final results were announced, but state TV showed large crowds waving the Iranian flag in the north-western city of Tabriz, which Pezeshkian had represented in parliament since 2008.

In Tehran, some Iranians hailed the outcome.

“We are very happy that Mr Pezeshkian won,” said Abolfazl, a 40-year-old architect who gave only his first name.

“I expected him to become the president because we really needed a well-educated president to solve the economic problems of the people.” 

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all major policy issues, congratulated Pezeshkian.

He urged him to “continue the path of Martyr Raisi and use the country’s many capacities, especially the revolutionary and faithful youth, for the comfort of the people and the progress of the country”.

Khamenei accused “enemies of the Iranian nation” of being behind a “scheme of boycotting the elections”.

After more than one million ballots were spoiled in the first round, the figure in the runoff was more than 600,000, according to figures provided by Eslami.

 ‘Conservative dominance’ 

The vote came with some Iranians having lost faith in the system, according to analysts.

“I don’t have any feelings” about Pezeshkian’s win, said Donya, a 53-year-old babysitter who doesn’t know “whether the situation is going to get better or worse”.

Donya, who gave only her first name, added: “I didn’t vote and I don’t have any feeling for Mr Pezeshkian or anyone else.”

All candidates were approved by Iran’s Guardian Council and Pezeshkian was the lone reformist allowed to stand.

Political expert Ali Vaez, from the International Crisis Group think tank, said on X that Pezeshkian will face challenges in implementing his platform because of “continued conservative dominance of other state institutions & limits of presidential authority”.

Jalili, 58, an Iranian nuclear negotiator until 2013, is known for his uncompromising anti-West stance. After his defeat he urged his supporters to help Pezeshkian in his new role.

Hassan Rouhani, a moderate in office until Raisi’s victory in 2021, congratulated Pezeshkian on his win.

Rouhani said voters had shown “they want a serious change in the state of governance in the country”.

They had voted “for constructive interaction with the world” and for revival of the nuclear deal, he added.

Pezeshkian vowed to ease long-standing internet restrictions and to “fully” oppose police patrols enforcing the mandatory headscarf for women, a high-profile issue since the death in police custody in 2022 of Mahsa Amini.

The 22-year-old Iranian Kurd had been detained for an alleged breach of the dress code, and her death sparked months of nationwide unrest.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanon's Hizbollah said it launched more than 200 rockets and explosive drones at Israeli military positions on Thursday as tensions have soared amid the almost nine-months-old war raging in Gaza.

The Iran-backed militant group said its latest attack, which followed the launch of over 100 rockets the previous day, came in response to Israel's killing of a senior Hizbollah commander in south Lebanon.

Israel did not report any deaths in its northern border area, where most communities have been evacuated, but quickly said it had responded with strikes on targets in southern Lebanon.

Israel and Hizbollah, an ally of Palestinian resistance group Hamas, have exchanged near daily cross-border fire since the Gaza war erupted on October 7, stoking fears the clashes could escalate into all-out war.

UN chief Antonio Guterres is "very worried about the escalation of the exchange of fire", his spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday, warning of the risk to the wider Middle East "if we were to find ourselves in a full-fledged conflict".

Hizbollah and Hamas are part of an Iran-led "Axis of Resistance" against Israel and the United States, a regional alliance that also includes Yemen's Houthi rebels and militant groups in Iraq and Syria.

The Israeli military said on Thursday its forces were "striking launch posts in southern Lebanon" after "numerous projectiles and suspicious aerial targets crossed from Lebanon into Israeli territory".

It said that most were intercepted by air defence systems but that "fires broke out in a number of areas in northern Israel" following the attacks.

Israel on Wednesday killed a senior Hizbollah commander, Mohammed Naameh Nasser, near the Lebanese coastal town of Tyre.

A source close to the group described him as the "Hizbollah commander responsible for one of three sectors in south Lebanon". Another border sector chief was killed in an Israeli strike last month.

Hizbollah said that "as part of the response to the... assassination carried out by the enemy" it had fired "more than 200 rockets" and "a squadron of explosive drones" at Israeli bases.

Air raid sirens blared across northern Israel in the morning, and an AFP correspondent witnessed rockets crossing the frontier that were intercepted.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 38,011 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The Israel-Hizbollah border clashes have killed at least 496 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israeli authorities say at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed on their side of the UN-patrolled border.

The Gaza war at the heart of the regional tensions has meanwhile raged on, and gun battles, air strikes and artillery shelling rocked Gaza City for an eight day on Thursday.

Israeli troops over the past day had “destroyed tunnel routes in the area and eliminated dozens of terrorists in close-quarters combat with tank fire, and in aerial strikes”, said the military.

Gaza’s civil defence agency said at least five people were killed in a strike that hit a Gaza City school.

Fears of renewed heavy fighting have also surged in Gaza’s southern areas near Khan Yunis and Rafah after the military on Monday issued a sweeping evacuation order that the UN said impacted 250,000 people.

Witnesses reported air strikes and intense artillery shelling in western Rafah on Thursday.

Efforts towards truce

Israel has faced an international outcry over the soaring civilian death toll, punishing siege and mass destruction in Gaza.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, this week again called for an end to the “maelstrom of human misery”.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted Israel will destroy Hamas and bring home the remaining hostages.

US President Joe Biden, under growing domestic pressure over Washington’s support for Israel, in late May outlined a roadmap for a six-week ceasefire and exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

There has been little progress since, but Hamas said Wednesday it was communicating with officials in Qatar and Egypt as well as Turkey with an eye to ending the conflict.

Hamas said its Qatar-based political chief Ismail Haniyeh had “made contact with the mediator brothers in Qatar and Egypt about the ideas that the movement is discussing with them with the aim of reaching an agreement”.

Netanyahu’s office and the Mossad intelligence service said “Israel is evaluating the (Hamas) remarks and will convey its reply to the mediators”.

The main stumbling block so far has centred on Hamas’s demand for a permanent end to the fighting — a demand Netanyahu and his right-wing nationalist government allies strongly reject.

PORT SUDAN, Sudan — Pro-democracy activists in Sudan on Thursday said around 25 people drowned in the Nile while trying to flee fighting between the Sudanese army and paramilitary forces in the southeast.

"Around 25 citizens, most of them women and children, have died in a boat sinking" while crossing the Blue Nile river in the south-eastern state of Sennar, a local resistance committee said in a statement.

The committee is one of hundreds across Sudan that used to organise pro-democracy protests and have coordinated frontline aid since the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began last year.

"Entire families perished" in the accident, they said, while fleeing the RSF's recent advance through Sennar.

On Saturday, the RSF announced they had captured a military base in Sinja, the capital of Sennar state, where over half-a-million people had sought shelter from the war.

Witnesses also reported the RSF sweeping through neighbouring villages, pushing residents to flee in small wooden boats across the Nile.

At least 55,000 people fled Sinja within a three-day period, the United Nations said on Monday.

Local authorities in neighbouring Gedaref state estimated on Thursday that some 120,000 displaced people had arrived this week. The state’s health minister Ahmed al-Amin Adam said 90,000 had been officially registered.

Over 10 million people are currently displaced across Sudan, in what the UN calls the world’s worst displacement crisis.

Sudan has been gripped by war since April 2023, when fighting erupted between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and the RSF led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The conflict in the country of 48 million has killed tens of thousands, with some estimates putting the death toll as high as 150,000, according to the United States envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello.

It has also torn the country apart into competing zones of control. The RSF holds much of the capital and the agricultural heartland to its south, nearly all of Darfur, and swathes of the southern Kordofan states.

In El Fasher in North Darfur — the only state capital in the Darfur region that the RSF has not captured — a paramilitary attack on a market on Wednesday “killed 15 civilians and injured 29 others,” health ministry official Ibrahim Khater told AFP Thursday.

Since fighting in the city began in early May, at least 278 people have been killed, according to French charity Doctors without Borders (MSF).

But the real toll is likely much higher, with most of those wounded unable to reach health facilities amid an ongoing siege and heavy street battles.

The hospitals in El Fasher — nearly all of which have shut down — have themselves been attacked at least nine times since May, according to MSF.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including targeting civilian infrastructure and indiscriminately shelling homes, markets and hospitals.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hizbollah said an Israeli air strike killed a senior commander in south Lebanon on Wednesday, the Iran-backed movement's second such loss in recent weeks.

Hizbollah has traded near daily cross-border fire with the Israeli army since its Palestinian ally Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, triggering war in Gaza, but an uptick in bellicose rhetoric from both sides in recent weeks has raised fears of all-out war.

"A Hizbollah commander responsible for one of three sectors in south Lebanon was killed" in an "Israeli strike on a car in Tyre", a source told AFP, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak to the media.

Hizbollah said that "commander Mohammed Naameh Nasser", also known as "Hajj Abu Naameh" had been killed, and also announced the death of a second fighter.

Another source close to the group, also requesting anonymity, confirmed Nasser was killed in the strike in Tyre, and said he was the third senior Hizbollah commander to be killed in almost nine months of hostilities.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA) said “an enemy drone targeted a car” in Tyre, a coastal city around 20 kilometres from the border.

The first source said Nasser had the same rank as Taleb Abdallah, a commander killed in an Israeli strike last month who was described by a Lebanese military source at the time as the “most important” Hizbollah commander killed to date.

That strike prompted Hizbollah to intensify its attacks on Israeli targets, firing barrages of rockets across the border in the days that followed.

In January, a security source said an Israeli strike killed Wissam Hassan Tawil, another top commander from the group.

‘Prevent a conflagration’

Hizbollah announced a series of attacks on Israeli troops and positions near the border on Wednesday, while the NNA reported Israeli attacks in other parts of south Lebanon.

The commander’s death followed a relative easing of cross-border exchanges over the past week, after threats on both sides had intensified.

Fears the violence, so far largely restricted to the border area, could turn into all-out war have sparked a flurry of diplomatic efforts to lower tensions.

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent a “conflagration” between Israel and Hizbollah.

US envoy Amos Hochstein, who has made repeated visits to Lebanon in recent months, was due in Paris on Wednesday where he was due to meet with Macron’s Lebanon envoy Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Iran warned on Saturday that “all resistance fronts” would confront Israel if it attacks Lebanon.

Last week, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said his country did not want war in Lebanon but could send it back to the “Stone Age” if diplomacy failed.

Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned in June that “no place” in Israel would be spared in the event of all-out war, and threatened nearby Cyprus if it opened its airports to Israel.

The cross-border violence has killed at least 495 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

Israeli authorities say at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces bombed and battled Hamas in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe in the territory's south.

Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City's Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets, said AFP reporters.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated, stressing on Tuesday that "this will not happen".

Military chief Herzi Halevi meanwhile said Israel is engaged in "a long campaign" to destroy Hamas over the October 7 surprise attack and to bring home the hostages held by Palestinian militants.

The United Nations warned that the almost nine-months-old war had "unleashed a maelstrom of human misery" and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into "an abyss of suffering".

Ten days after Netanyahu said the war's "intense phase" was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire on fighters in the Shujaiya district.

The air force struck “over 50 terror infrastructure sites” across Gaza in 24 hours while ground troops “eliminated terrorists”, located tunnels and found weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, the military said.

The Israeli forces — which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago — on Sunday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road there, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.

The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been impacted by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the order covers 117 square kilometres, or “about a third of the Gaza Strip, making it the largest such order since October”.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council in New York on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 per cent of Gaza’s population.

She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.

“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” she said. “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, said the World Health Organisation.

Wafaa Elwan, a Palestinian mother of seven who now lives in a tent city by the sea, said: “We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us.”

She said her five-year-old son, much of whose body was covered in rashes and welts, “can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body”.

The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive since then has killed at least 37,925 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

The Israeli forces said on Wednesday that “operational activities continue throughout the Gaza Strip”.

The Gaza civil defence agency said seven people were killed when a strike hit a family house north of Gaza City.

Another strike killed three people in a car at Al Maghazi refugee camp in the central Deir Al Balah area, said an AFP reporter.

Air strikes also hit homes in Rafah, according to Gaza’s government media office.

The New York Times has quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages, even if that meant not achieving all of the war goals.

Netanyahu, who heads a government including hardline right-wing parties, strongly rejected this on Tuesday and vowed Israel would not give in to the “winds of defeatism”.

“The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.

BEIRUT — Lebanon's Iran-backed Hizbollah group said it launched dozens of rockets into northern Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for an Israeli strike that killed a civilian in the country's south.

Israel and Hizbollah, an ally of Hamas, have traded near-daily cross-border fire since the Palestinian fighter group's October 7 attack on Israel sparked war in the Gaza Strip.

Hizbollah fighters launched "dozens of Katyusha rockets" at army barracks in northern Israel "in response to the Israeli enemy's attacks... and the killing of a civilian", the Lebanese group said in a statement.

The Israeli army identified “approximately 15 projectiles... crossing from Lebanon, and 10 were successfully intercepted” without causing casualties, it said in a statement.

The army also said it struck a “Hizbollah military structure” in the area of the border village of Yarin.

Earlier Tuesday, Lebanese state media, an official and a minister said an Israeli strike killed a civilian in the country’s south.

“The strike that targeted Bustan killed a civilian,” said Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency, after earlier reporting Israeli warplanes had struck the village.

Bustan Mayor Adnan Ahmed told AFP the strike killed Muhieddin Abu Dallah, a farmer in his 50s, and damaged his house and agricultural machinery.

In a post on social media platform X, Agriculture Minister Abbas Al Hajj Hassan described Abu Dallah as “a Lebanese farmer who resisted the occupation by remaining steadfast on his land, and sacrificed his life”.

The violence between Hezbollah and Israel has killed 493 people in Lebanon, most of them fighters but also including 95 civilians, according to an AFP tally.

On the Israeli side, at least 15 soldiers and 11 civilians have been killed, according to authorities.

Fears had mounted that the cross-border clashes could turn into a full-blown conflict until the past week, when the fighting dropped in intensity.

GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories — Israeli forces carried out deadly strikes on Tuesday on southern Gaza and battled fighters after the army again ordered Palestinians to leave areas near the besieged territory's border with Israel and Egypt.

Witnesses reported intense bombing and shelling around Khan Yunis, southern Gaza's main city from which Israeli forces withdrew in early April after a devastating months-long battle.

A hospital source in the city said shelling killed eight people and wounded more than 30 others.

The bombardment came after a rocket barrage at southern Israel claimed by the fighter group Islamic Jihad, which has fought alongside Hamas.

This was followed by an order to evacuate most areas east of the cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah, including the towns of Al Qarara and Bani Suhaila.

The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees estimated on Tuesday that a quarter of a million people had been impacted since Israel's army issued a new evacuation order for parts of southern Gaza a day earlier.

"We've seen people moving, families moving, people starting to pack up their belongings and try to leave this area," UNRWA spokeswoman Louise Wateridge told reporters in Geneva via video-link from Gaza.

The agency "estimates that around 250,000 people have been impacted by these orders", she said, adding: "We expect these numbers to grow."

The 250,000 number was UNRWA's estimate for the people in the area of new evacuation orders in eastern Khan Yunis, Wateridge told AFP.

“We expect that almost all of these people will move from this area,” she said, adding that the agency hoped to get a better idea later Tuesday of the numbers who have physically left.

Bani Suhaila resident Ahmad Najjar said the Israeli order has spurred “fear and extreme anxiety”, and “there is a large displacement of residents”.

Six consecutive days of intense battles followed a similar evacuation order issued last week for the Gaza City district of Shujaiya.

An AFP correspondent reported artillery shelling in the northern area on Tuesday, and witnesses said gun battles raged on.

The military said its forces were operating in Shujaiya, central Gaza and Rafah, where aircraft carried out strikes and troops “ambushed an armed terrorist squad” in a car and killed them.

Over the past day, the Israeli air force “struck approximately 30 terror targets” across Gaza, said a military statement.

In Shujaiya, Palestinian militants “were eliminated and dozens of terrorist infrastructure sites above and below ground were dismantled, including tunnel shafts”, it added.

‘Downshift’

In central Gaza, witnesses said strikes hit the Nuseirat refugee camp where the Palestinian Red Crescent reported at least one dead, a child.

Other parts of the Gaza Strip were reeling from continued fighting nearly nine months into the war, sparked by Hamas October 7 attack on Israel.

Months of on-and-off talks towards a truce and hostage release deal have meanwhile made little progress, even after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently declared that the “intense phase” of the war was winding down.

“We’ve heard the Israelis talk about a significant downshift in their operations in Gaza,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday.

“It remains to be seen.”

The latest order to leave parts of southern Gaza follows an evacuation of Rafah nearly two months ago which had signalled the start of a long-feared Israeli ground offensive.

The fighting since then has again uprooted many Palestinians and led to the closure of a key aid crossing.

The United Nations and relief agencies have voiced alarm over the dire humanitarian crisis and the threat of starvation the war and Israeli siege have brought for Gaza’s 2.4 million people.

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 37,900 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

Israeli occupation authorities on Monday released Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Gaza City’s Al Shifa hospital — the territory’s largest medical complex — along with dozens of other detainees returned to Gaza for treatment.

Speaking after his release, Abu Salmiya said he had suffered “severe torture” during his detention.

“Several inmates died in interrogation centres and were deprived of food and medicine,” he said.

‘Try peace’

Israel has accused Hamas of using Al-Shifa and other hospitals as a cover for military operations, claims Gaza militants have rejected.

Netanyahu, who has faced growing anger from protesters over his handling of the conflict as well as pressure from hardline coalition partners, criticised the release which he said had been made without his knowledge.

The Israeli premier said Abu Salmiya belongs “in prison” because Israeli hostages were “murdered and held” in the now ravaged hospital he runs.

Successive Israeli raids have reduced large parts of Al Shifa to rubble.

The director’s return to Gaza was “a serious mistake and a moral failure”, Netanyahu said.

According to Abu Salmiya, Israel brought no charges against him during his seven-month detention.

DEIR EL BALAH, Palestinian Territories — The head of the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital said on Monday after being freed from more than seven months of detention that he had been "tortured" by Israel.

Al Shifa Hospital Director Mohammed Abu Salmiya was among more than 50 Palestinians released and returned to Gaza for treatment, according to an Israeli minister and a medical source in the besieged territory.

Salmiya said he was put through "severe torture" during his detention, which left him with a broken thumb.

"Prisoners are subjected to all kinds of torture," he told a press conference. "Several inmates died in interrogation centres and were deprived of food and medicine."

"For two months no prisoner ate more than a loaf of bread a day," said Salmiya.

"Detainees were subjected to physical and psychological humiliation."

The medical chief said no charge had ever been made against him.

Israeli forces detained Salmiya during one of a number of raids on Al Shifa.

The hospital has largely been reduced to rubble by successive raids since Israel launched its assault on Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attacks.

Salmiya and the other freed detainees crossed back into Gaza from Israel just east of Khan Yunis, a medical source at the Al Aqsa hospital in Deir Al Balah told AFP.

Five detainees were admitted to Al Aqsa hospital and the others were sent to hospitals in Khan Yunis, the source added.

An AFP correspondent at Deir Al Balah saw some detainees in emotional reunions with their families.

Israel’s military said it was “checking” reports about the release.

However, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir confirmed the operation when he posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Salmiya’s release “with dozens of other terrorists is security abandonment”.

Israel’s military has accused Hamas of using hospitals in the Gaza Strip as a cover for military operations. It has raided Al Shifa and other hospitals, and says it has found tunnels and other infrastructure.

The militant group, which has run the territory since 2007, denies the allegations.

The Gaza European hospital in Khan Yunis said the head of its orthopaedic unit, Bassam Miqdad, was also among those freed on Monday.

In May, Palestinian rights groups said a senior Al Shifa surgeon had died in an Israeli jail after being detained. The Israeli army said it was unaware of the death.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,877 people, also mostly civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.