Israel-Lebanon live: Hezbollah drone attack kills 4 Israeli soldiers as US to deploy Thaad missile system

Hezbollah drone attack on an army base in central Israel killed four soldiers and severely wounded seven others, the military said, in the deadliest strike by the militant group since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon nearly two weeks ago. The Iran-backed group called the attack near Binyamina city retaliation for Israeli strikes on Beirut on Thursday that killed 22 people.

It later said it targeted Israel’s elite Golani brigade, launching dozens of missiles to occupy Israeli air defense systems during the assault by “squadrons” of drones.

Israel’s national rescue service said the attack wounded 61.

With Israel’s advanced air-defence systems, it’s rare for so many people to be injured by drones or missiles. Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire almost daily in the year since the war in Gaza began, and fighting has escalated.

Since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have clashed along the border while the Lebanese army has largely stood on the sidelines.

It’s not the first time the national army has found itself watching war at home from the discomfiting position of bystander.

Lebanon’s widely beloved army is one of the few institutions that bridge the country’s sectarian and political divides. Several army commanders have become president, and the current commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, is widely regarded as one of the front-runners to step in when the deadlocked parliament fills a two-year vacuum and names a president.

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Two members of the British civil resistance group Youth Demand have been arrested after they pasted a photo of a mother and child from Gaza over Pablo Picasso’s painting Motherhood at the National Gallery on 9 October to protest arms sales to Israel.

The activists who put the photo on the protective glass of Picasso’s 1901 work and dumped red paint on the floor were National Health Services worker Jai Halai, 23, and Politics and International Relations student Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 21. The photo they used was taken by Palestinian journalist Ali Jadallah at Al-Shifa Hospital in March.

Museum security detained the activists and took the photo off. The museum confirmed that there was no damage to the artwork.

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Donald Trump’s family business tried to open a luxury hotel in Jerusalem, Israel, according to a report.

The Trump Organization sought a deal last year to open a Trump-branded hotel on the former site of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The New York Times reported.

The former president’s company also looked into transforming a developing skyscraper — near the Israel Defense Forces headquarters — in Tel Aviv into another hotel. Once completed, that building will house the most hotel rooms in the country, the outlet noted.

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Police-recorded religious hate crime in England and Wales was up by a quarter over the past year, driven by a rise in offences against Jews and Muslims since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, official figures show.

Hate crimes targeted at Jewish people more than doubled while incidents against Muslims were up 13% on the previous 12 months, according to Home Office data.

There were a total of 10,484 religious hate crime offences recorded by police in the year to March, up 25% from 8,370 the previous year.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon of serving as “human shields” for Hezbollah after Israeli strikes wounded five of them in recent days.

The Israeli military has warned UNIFIL to evacuate southern Lebanon as it carries out air and ground operations against Hezbollah militants, but the peacekeepers have so far refused.

Netanyahu said Sunday that their refusal to clear out “has the effect of providing Hezbollah terrorists with human shields,” saying they had become “hostages of Hezbollah.”

“We regret the injury to the UNIFIL soldiers and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this injury. But the simple and obvious way to ensure this is simply to get them out of the danger zone,” he said in a video addressed to the UN secretary-general, who has been banned from entering Israel.

The military has ordered the peacekeepers to move five kilometers (three miles) north, which would effectively keep them from doing their mission. They have already halted patrols because of air and ground attacks.

Israel has long accused the United Nations of being biased against it and relations have plunged further since the start of the war in Gaza. It has accused the UN agency for Palestinian refugees of having been infiltrated by Hamas, allegations the agency denies.

The UK is among 40 nations “strongly” condemning attacks on United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon.

Earlier this week, Israeli troops fired on UN headquarters in southern Lebanon, injuring two peacekeepers for the second time in as many days.

On Saturday, it was reported by the United Nations that another peacekeeper was injured by gunfire in the country’s south.

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An Israeli strike on the central Gaza Strip killed a family of eight, Palestinian medical officials said Sunday, as Israeli forces battled Palestinian militants in the territory’s north and airstrikes destroyed a century-old market in southern Lebanon.

The strike in Gaza late Saturday hit a home in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing parents and their six children, who ranged in age from 8 to 23, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah, where the bodies were taken.

It said a further seven people were wounded, including two women and a child in critical condition. An Associated Press reporter counted the bodies.

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Two events took place last weekend in Germany. At a conference in Berlin called The Big Chill, a group of thinkers and activists denounced what they called “anticipatory obedience” in which Germans, including Jews, had been “muted, de-platformed and stigmatised” for criticising Israel’s response to the atrocities of 7 October 2023.

At the same time, in a small town called Zeitz in eastern Germany, 10 “stumbling stones”, small memorial brass plates denoting the homes of Jews taken to be exterminated in concentration camps, were ripped up. “Whoever did this wants to tear the Holocaust out of our memory,” a leading local politician, Götz Ulrich, declared.

The sad fact is both sets of assertions are largely true. And yet, it was a weekend like any other and neither event received particular coverage.

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Since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have clashed along the border while the Lebanese army has largely stood on the sidelines.

It’s not the first time the national army has found itself watching war at home from the discomfiting position of bystander.

Lebanon’s widely beloved army is one of the few institutions that bridge the country’s sectarian and political divides. Several army commanders have become president, and the current commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, is widely regarded as one of the front-runners to step in when the deadlocked parliament fills a two-year vacuum and names a president.

Read the full article here: