Unifil: IDF fires at watchtower near southern Lebanon
Israeli forces have fired at a UN interim force in Lebanon (Unifil) tower in Kafer Kela, a village in south Lebanon, the UN peacekeeping group reported on Wednesday.
In a statement on X, Unifil wrote:
This morning, peacekeepers at a position near Kafer Kela observed an IDF Merkava tank firing at their watchtower. Two cameras were destroyed, and the tower was damaged. Yet again we see direct and apparently deliberate fire on a Unifil position.
UNIFIL statement:
This morning, peacekeepers at a position near Kafer Kela observed an IDF Merkava tank firing at their watchtower. Two cameras were destroyed, and the tower was damaged.
Yet again we see direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.
— UNIFIL (@UNIFIL_) October 16, 2024
It went on to add:
We remind the IDF and all actors of their obligations to ensure the safety and security of UN personnel and property and to respect the inviolability of UN premises at all times.
In recent weeks, Israeli forces have fired numerous times at Unifil posts in Lebanon, damaging towers while also wounding at least five peacekeepers and forcibly entering a base. Unifil has also called the IDF’s actions “shocking violations”.
Israel has urged Unifil to withdraw from its bases, to which the peacekeeping force said, “We’re staying,” attributing its mandated presence to the UN security council.
Key events
The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Gaza has released the following figures of its rescue efforts amid Israeli attacks on its staff members and volunteers in the past year:
-
34 PRCS staff and volunteers have been forcibly detained and disappeared.
-
34 PRCS staff and volunteers were injured while on duty.
-
PRCS facilities were destroyed or damaged 75 times.
-
29 PRCS ambulances were taken out of service.
For more than a year, our staff and volunteers in the #Gaza Strip have been working for 24 hours, every single day, in unimaginable conditions. Every day, we live and work through terrifying ordeals, and risk our lives to help others. #NotATarget #IHL pic.twitter.com/Pp6e9bMDAc
— PRCS (@PalestineRCS) October 16, 2024
Israeli forces have routinely targeted rescue and healthcare workers amid its deadly war on Gaza. In May, the Human Rights Watch released a report in which it found that Israeli forces are attacking known aid worker locations across the narrow strip.
“This pattern of attacks despite proper notification of Israeli authorities raises serious questions about Israel’s commitment and capacity to comply with international humanitarian law,” the HRW said.
Jason Burke
The brother of a teenage Palestinian computing student who burned to death in a blaze sparked by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital compound has described how he tried to save his injured sibling as flames engulfed tents.
“I heard the sound of bombing, I looked out and saw very black smoke next to our tent,” said Mohammed al-Dalou, speaking to Reuters at the location of the strike in Deir al-Balah, where charred ground and twisted debris lay between still-standing tents.
Dalou, 17, said he ran out of the tent and saw his father pulling his younger siblings from the flames. When he tried to reach his older brother Shaban, people held him back, he said.
Three other people died, including Dalou’s mother, Ala’a Abdel Nasser al-Dalou, 37. “I can’t describe the feeling. I saw my brother burning in front of me and my mother was burning,” Mohammed said.
Footage taken by witnesses on mobile phones shows 19-year-old Shaban, who was being treated for an injury, lying on his back on a bed, frantically waving his arms before being engulfed by the blaze. The images, which have been viewed by millions around the world since the attack on Monday, have prompted further outrage at a time when Israel faces acute concern from its allies about its conduct of the war in Gaza.
Earlier today, the UN representative for Palestine addressed an emergency UN security council meeting.
Riyad Mansour told the international community “it is time to act” amid growing concern over the lack of aid reaching Palestinians on the ground:
“It is time to act. Anything else is complicity and surrender. The Palestinian people enduring hell did not surrender. Neither should you. Stop the genocide.” pic.twitter.com/YeJgRMytYR
— State of Palestine (@Palestine_UN) October 16, 2024
Israeli forces have reportedly stormed the Jazalone refugee camp in the West Bank and deployed tear gas, Al Jazeera reports.
A young girl was reportedly treated for breathing issues.
Here are some images coming through the newswires from Lebanon, where Israeli forces have killed more than 2,300 people – including at least 28 healthcare workers – in recent weeks while forcibly displacing 1.2 million people across the country:
Unifil: IDF fires at watchtower near southern Lebanon
Israeli forces have fired at a UN interim force in Lebanon (Unifil) tower in Kafer Kela, a village in south Lebanon, the UN peacekeeping group reported on Wednesday.
In a statement on X, Unifil wrote:
This morning, peacekeepers at a position near Kafer Kela observed an IDF Merkava tank firing at their watchtower. Two cameras were destroyed, and the tower was damaged. Yet again we see direct and apparently deliberate fire on a Unifil position.
UNIFIL statement:
This morning, peacekeepers at a position near Kafer Kela observed an IDF Merkava tank firing at their watchtower. Two cameras were destroyed, and the tower was damaged.
Yet again we see direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.
— UNIFIL (@UNIFIL_) October 16, 2024
It went on to add:
We remind the IDF and all actors of their obligations to ensure the safety and security of UN personnel and property and to respect the inviolability of UN premises at all times.
In recent weeks, Israeli forces have fired numerous times at Unifil posts in Lebanon, damaging towers while also wounding at least five peacekeepers and forcibly entering a base. Unifil has also called the IDF’s actions “shocking violations”.
Israel has urged Unifil to withdraw from its bases, to which the peacekeeping force said, “We’re staying,” attributing its mandated presence to the UN security council.
Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said that there have been no conversations with any parties on a Gaza ceasefire for the last three to four weeks, Reuters reports.
Speaking at the European Union-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit in Brussels, Sheikh Mohammed said:
On the prospects of the negotiation … basically in the last three to four weeks, there is no conversation or engagement at all, and we are just moving in the same circle with the silence from all parties.
Flattened buildings and streets lined with piles of rubble and debris can be seen in footage of the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on the town in southern Lebanon that killed at least 15 people:
The global non-profit charity ActionAid has released the following statement from its Beirut-based regional campaigns coordinator, Sabine Abiaad:
We are living in constant fear, unsure when the next attack might happen, leading to anxiety and depression. I am in my forties, and I’ve lived through every phase of war in Lebanon. Now, I find myself facing a painful déjà vu as my daughter, a teenager, and my 12-year-old son ask me the same questions I used to ask my own mother: ‘Are we going to survive? Will we be targeted? Are we going to be killed?’ Old traumas come flooding back, and the child in me, who lived through the earlier conflict in Beirut, is still afraid. I try to reassure them, telling them we should be grateful because we still have our home. But the threat is everywhere – it hangs over our heads, day and night, like a constant, invisible weight that never lets us feel truly safe.
Conflict and the psychological pressure disrupt every aspect of our daily life, leaving us in a constant struggle to adapt to unpredictable conditions, uncertainty and creating a constant state of mental fatigue.
More than 2,300 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon since Israel launched its attacks on the country several weeks ago. An additional 1.2 million people have been forcibly displaced across the country as the World Health Organization warns of a growing cholera risk.
Nineteen-year-old Palestinian burned to death in Israeli airstrike would have turned 20 today
Shaban al-Dalou, the 19-year-old Palestinian who was burned to death in his makeshift tent when Israel bombed the al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital complex in Deir el-Balah on Monday, would have turned 20 today.
In a new report for Drop Site News, Gaza-based journalist Abubaker Abed spoke to al-Dalou’s family about their son.
“His life was only work during the war. He would get up in the early morning, bring all the necessities for his family, and buy all the needs for the makeshift falafel stall. He was his family’s heart and hope. If he ever wanted to find some respite, he would relax and swim in the sea for one hour or so and then come back immediately for work,” al-Dalou’s cousin said.
Al-Dalou, who was a student at Gaza’s al-Azhar University, which Israel destroyed, would have turned 20 today. Abed reports that al-Dalou had been applying to universities in Qatar, Ireland and the UK before he was burned to death in the Israeli airstrike – with his IV still connected to him. Al-Dalou had survived a previous Israeli airstrike on a mosque on 6 October and had spent hours each day studying in his tent while recovering from his injuries.
“Losing him is an incredibly massive loss,” al-Dalou’s uncle, Mohammed al-Dalou said, adding: “He left a mountain of pain and memories.”
Hezbollah said it has fired rockets at the Israeli town of Safed, Reuters reports.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Hezbollah said that it targeted “at 6.50pm (1550 GMT) … the occupied town of Safed with a salvo of rockets” in “defense of Lebanon and its people”.
The reported attack marks the third attack in 24 hours which Hezbollah said was a response to Israeli raids across Lebanon which have killed more than 2,000 people in recent weeks.
As well as warning about the risk of cholera spreading in Lebanon after a case was identified there, the WHO urged Israel to ensure the necessary conditions to finish the job of vaccinating Gaza’s children against polio, after reaching more than 150,000 with the required second dose.
Despite continuing Israeli military operations in the territory, the second round of a polio vaccination campaign, aiming to reach more than 590,000 children under the age of 10, got under way on Monday.
“The total number of children who received a second dose of polio vaccine in central Gaza after two days of vaccination is 156,943,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X along with a video showing the WHO’s vaccination efforts. “The vaccination continues today. At the same time, 128,121 children received vitamin A supplements.
“We call for the humanitarian pauses to continue to be respected. We call for a ceasefire and peace,” he said.
The total number of children who received a second dose of #polio vaccine in central #Gaza after two days of vaccination is 156,943. The vaccination continues today.
At the same time, 128,121 children received vitamin A supplements.
We call for the humanitarian pauses to… pic.twitter.com/TCWqYF13vn
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) October 16, 2024
Hezbollah said it fired rockets at the northern Israeli town of Safed today, the third such attack in 24 hours which the Lebanese armed group described as a response to Israeli raids, AFP reports.
Militants from the Iran-backed group targeted “at 6:50 pm (1550 GMT)… the occupied town of Safed with a salvo of rockets” in “defence of Lebanon and its people,” Hezbollah said in a statement.
WHO: cholera case confirmed in Lebanon, risk of spread ‘very high’
The risk of cholera spreading in Lebanon is “very high”, the World Health Organization has warned, after a case of the acute and potentially deadly infection was detected in the conflict-hit country, AFP reports.
The WHO highlighted the risk of cholera spreading among hundreds of thousands of people displaced since Israel escalated its campaign against Hezbollah.
“If the cholera outbreak … spreads to the new displaced people, it might spread very fast,” Abdinasir Abubakar, WHO’s representative in Lebanon, told reporters at an online news conference.
Lebanon’s health ministry said a cholera case had been confirmed in a Lebanese national who went to hospital on Monday. The patient, from Ammouniyeh in northern Lebanon, had no history of travel, the ministry said.
Lebanon suffered its first cholera outbreak in 30 years between 2022 and 2023, mainly in the north of the country. The disease, which causes severe diarrhoea, vomiting and muscle cramps, generally arises from eating or drinking food or water that is contaminated with the bacterium, according to the WHO.
The UN health agency has for months been warning that the disease could resurface amid “deteriorating water and sanitation” among the displaced and their host communities, Abubakar said.
US tells Israel is opposes daily strikes on Beirut
The US has told Israel it opposes near-daily strikes in densely populated Beirut and it was crucial that Israeli operations be conducted in a way that does not threaten civilian lives, Reuters reports.
The comments by spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre at a daily press briefing come as more strikes continue in Beirut. The State Department said yesterday it opposed the strikes.
An Israeli strike on a municipality building in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatieh earlier today killed 16 people and wounded 52, the Lebanese health ministry said, giving a final toll.
The Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati earlier condemned the deadly Israeli strikes, saying they intentionally targeted a municipality meeting.
