Israel’s war on Gaza live: Israel kills 5 in Tulkarem strike, raids city
- Israeli forces are raiding Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank after an air strike on a car killed at least five there. The Israeli army claims the strike killed a local commander of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing.
- The Pentagon says the US military will deploy additional jet fighters and warships to the region amid growing anticipation of possible Iranian retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Civil defence reports deadly Israeli strike on Bureij
The rescue organisation in the Gaza Strip says its crews recovered the bodies of two people who were killed when the Israeli army bombed a house in Block 1 of the Bureij refugee camp.
The civil defence added that three people were wounded in the attack on central Gaza.
US calls for de-escalation in region ‘ring hollow’: Analyst
Abdullah al-Arian, associate professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, said few in the region are taking the US’s calls for de-escalation seriously, as Washington has been the “crucial partner in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and in its regional escalation” over the past 10 months.
“The US has never once condemned or at least even attempted to pull back from the brink of this all-out regional war. We’ve never really seen any action in that regard,” al-Arian told Al Jazeera.
“So all of these statements [on de-escalation] ring hollow for most of the people in this region who are observing, for instance, that the US has not had a word to say about the dual assassination this past week, and what that means in terms of a very dangerous escalation. And what it could mean in terms of the spillover into a much wider regional conflict,” he said.
