Iran’s response to the killing of Hamas chief in Tehran will be ‘definite and calculated’, foreign minister says
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, has spoken with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. He was reported to have told Tajani that Iran’s response to the killing of the Hamas chief in Tehran would be “definite and calculated”.
Iran blames Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on 31 July, which Araqchi was quoted by Iran’s state media as saying was “an unforgivable violation of Iran’s security and sovereignty”.
The Israeli government officially declined to comment on Haniyeh’s death, but the strike was widely acknowledged as an Israeli operation both inside the country and beyond.
“Iran does not seek to increase tensions. However it is not afraid of it,” Araqchi told his Italian counterpart on the phone. He said that Iran’s response would be “definite, calculated and accurate”, according to the statement.
Israel vowed to kill all Hamas leaders after the 7 October attacks, and its intelligence services have a history of carrying out covert killings inside Iran, mostly targeting scientists working on the country’s nuclear programme.
Key events
As we mentioned in the opening summary, Israeli evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital, the main medical facility in Deir Al-Balah, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of bombardments.
The hospital is close to the area covered by the evacuation notice.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said yesterday that an explosion approximately 250 meters (820ft) away from the MSF-supported al-Aqsa hospital triggered panic.
“As a result, MSF is considering whether to suspend wound care for the time being, while trying to maintain life-saving treatment.”
From around 650 patients, only 100 remain in the hospital, with seven in intensive care unit, it said, citing Gaza’s health ministry.
Witnesses report deadly airstrikes and shelling in Gaza overnight
Witnesses and Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents have reported air strikes and shelling in Gaza overnight.
Medics said an airstrike on a Gaza City house killed at least five people, with two rescuers telling AFP more victims may be buried in the ruins in Al-Rimal neighbourhood.
“There are still martyrs and body parts under the rubble, most of them women, men and elderly people who were sleeping” when the building was hit, ambulance driver Hussein Muhaysen said.
More than 40,000 Palestinian people have been killed in the war, according to the enclave’s health ministry.
The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister’s death to be prosecuted and punished.
Frankcom, a 43-year-old from Melbourne who was working in Gaza with World Central Kitchen, was one of seven people killed in April when a convoy of cars was hit by an Israeli airstrike.
Israel’s defence force conducted an investigation into the incident, which resulted in two officers being dismissed and three others being reprimanded.
Mal Frankcom told the ABC he did not feel this was an adequate response.
“[I’d like] to see them go to court and to be tried and convicted and punished,” he said.
You can read the full story by Kate Lyons, a reporter for Guardian Australia, here:
Israel has lost its deterrent power as it was unable to anticipate the time and place of Hezbollah’s “limited and managed attack”, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Nasser Kanaani, wrote in a post on X.
He wrote:
The myth of the invincibility of the Israeli army has long become an empty slogan. The Israeli terrorist army has lost its effective offensive and deterrent power and now has to defend itself against strategic strikes.
Kanaani added that Israel “now has to defend itself within its occupied territories” and that “strategic balances have undergone fundamental changes” to the detriment of Israel.
The Israel Defense Forces used 100 jet fighters that hit more than 40 target sites inside Lebanon in sorties over a period of seven hours on Sunday. Hezbollah, the Iran backed Lebanese militant group, launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel.
The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, downplayed the impact of Israeli airstrikes and portrayed Hezbollah’s aerial attack, intended to avenge the killing of a senior commander last month, as a success.
Nasrallah said that Hezbollah had used its Katyusha rockets (320 of them according to its official statements) to distract Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system from a mass drone attacks. He added that all the drones involved had been successfully launched and had entered Israeli airspace, but did not say how many, if any, had reached their intended target. You can read more on this story here.
With three deaths confirmed in Lebanon and one in Israel after Sunday’s exchanges, both sides indicated they were happy to avoid further escalation for now, but warned that there could be more strikes to come.
Israeli military strikes killed at least seven Palestinians on Monday, medics said. Two people were killed in Deir Al-Balah, two people at a school in the Al-Nuseirat camp and three people in the southern city of Rafah, near the border with Egypt.
Israel issued new evacuation orders for Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday evening, forcing more families to flee. Israel says Hamas fighters are operating in the area. The Deir Al-Balah municipality said Israeli evacuation orders have displaced about 250,000 people.
Sawasn Abu Afesh said she and her children had now been displaced 11 times.
She told Reuters:
I left half of my children behind me near my furniture and I am now with my little ones and my daughter, only God can help us…
I have no money for transportation I will go to area 17 where my family is staying on my foot. I took my kids and three are left behind. No idea where.
Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced multiple times since the start of the war. Even in areas designated safe zones, there have been regular reports of Palestinian people being killed by Israeli strikes.
Aid agencies say the remaining humanitarian zones, which comprise a small percentage of the strip’s total area, are already too full to accommodate new arrivals.
The waters on parts of Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline have started turning brown, according to satellite images analysed by BBC Arabic which show a large discharge of sewage spill off the coast of of the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
“It is because of the increase in the number of displaced people and many are connecting their own pipes to the rainwater drainage system,” Abu Yazan Ismael Sarsour, head of the Deir al-Balah emergency committee, told BBC Arabic.
Frequent Israeli airstrikes have resulted in the collapse of Gaza’s waste water management infrastructure, the UN has said, with aid agencies warning that flows of untreated sewage pose a serious threat to health.
We mentioned in the opening summary that about 60 media and rights organisations have urged the EU to suspend a co-operation accord with Israel and impose sanctions, accusing it of “massacring journalists” in Gaza.
In a statement, the groups said:
In response to the unprecedented number of journalists killed and other repeated press freedom violations by the Israeli authorities since the start of the war with Hamas, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and 59 other organisations are calling on the European Union to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel and to adopt targeted sanctions against those responsible.
More than 130 Palestinian journalists and media professionals have been killed by the Israeli armed forces in Gaza since 7 October. At least 30 of them were killed in the course of their work, three Lebanese journalists and an Israeli journalist have also been (killed) during the same period.
The targeted or indiscriminate killing of journalists, whether committed deliberately or recklessly, is a war crime.
EU’s association agreements with non-member countries are treaties that govern bilateral relations, including trade.
The agreement’s Article 2 stipulates “respect for human rights and democratic principles”, Julie Majerczak, the head of RSF’s Brussels office, said. She said “the Israeli government is clearly trampling on this article”.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, an American press freedom charity, describes the war as the deadliest period for media workers since it began collating its figures three decades ago. Foreign media are banned by Israel and Egypt from entering Gaza to cover the war. Palestinian reporters are the only journalists reporting from the ground.
The Israel Defense Forces have reportedly given residents of the southern Golan Heights the all-clear after drone alert sirens rang out in communities near the Sea of Galilee. It is not entirely clear why the drone alert sirens were activated.
“The incident has ended,” it said in a short statement, according to the Times of Israel.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 and later annexed it, saying it needed the strategic plateau for its security.
The US is the only country to recognise the annexation, while the rest of the international community considers the area to be occupied Syrian territory.
Most Hezbollah attacks since 8 October 2023 have hit northern Israel, with fewer strikes on the Golan Heights.
Iran’s response to the killing of Hamas chief in Tehran will be ‘definite and calculated’, foreign minister says
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, has spoken with his Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani. He was reported to have told Tajani that Iran’s response to the killing of the Hamas chief in Tehran would be “definite and calculated”.
Iran blames Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on 31 July, which Araqchi was quoted by Iran’s state media as saying was “an unforgivable violation of Iran’s security and sovereignty”.
The Israeli government officially declined to comment on Haniyeh’s death, but the strike was widely acknowledged as an Israeli operation both inside the country and beyond.
“Iran does not seek to increase tensions. However it is not afraid of it,” Araqchi told his Italian counterpart on the phone. He said that Iran’s response would be “definite, calculated and accurate”, according to the statement.
Israel vowed to kill all Hamas leaders after the 7 October attacks, and its intelligence services have a history of carrying out covert killings inside Iran, mostly targeting scientists working on the country’s nuclear programme.
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and the wider Middle East crisis.
Ceasefire talks in Cairo have ended with no agreement, several sources have told media, though lower level negotiations were set to continue and the US said it was still “feverishly” pursuing a deal.
The news came hours after Israel and the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah launched their heaviest exchange of fire since the war began, with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowing that the Israeli air raids were “not the end of the story”.
Months of on-off talks have failed to produce an agreement to end Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza or free the remaining hostages seized by Hamas in the militant group’s 7 October attack on Israel which triggered the war.
Key sticking points in ongoing talks mediated by the US, Egypt and Qatar include an Israeli presence in the so-called Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5-km-long (9-mile-long) stretch of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
Mediators put forward a number of alternatives to the presence of Israeli forces on the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor which cuts across the middle of the Gaza Strip, but none were accepted by the parties, Egyptian sources told Reuters.
Speaking at a news conference in Halifax, Canada, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington was still “feverishly” working in Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari mediators as well as the Israelis to get a ceasefire and a hostage deal.
In other developments:
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In central Gaza meanwhile the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said an Israeli order to evacuate the area around al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah had caused chaos and called the situation “unacceptable”. “MSF is considering whether to suspend wound care for the time being, while trying to maintain life-saving treatment. From around 650 patients, only 100 remain in the hospital, with 7 in intensive care unit according to the Ministry of Health,” it said on X.
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About 60 media and rights organisations on Monday urged the European Union to suspend a co-operation accord with Israel and impose sanctions, accusing it of “massacring journalists” in Gaza.
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Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, has said his country will respond to the assassination of Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. “Iran’s reaction to Israeli terrorist attack in Tehran is definitive, and will be measured & well calculated,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X. “We do not fear escalation, yet do not seek it – unlike Israel.”
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US defence secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered two aircraft carrier strike groups to remain in the Middle East, Reuters reports, citing the Pentagon.
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Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah delivered a public address after Sunday’s exchange of fire, saying that the group’s response to the Israeli assassination of a senior commander in Beirut had been delayed for several reasons including mass Israeli and US military mobilisation. He added: “We will assess the impact of today’s operation. If results are not seen to be enough, we will respond another time.”
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Jordan has warned that heightened escalation between Israel and Hezbollah could lead to a “regional war”, echoing comments made by Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, earlier. Foreign ministry spokesperson Sufain Qudah said that Israel’s relentless “aggression” in Gaza and the failure to reach a ceasefire was exposing the region to the dangers of an expansion of the conflict, Jordanian state media reported.
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The UN’s Palestine relief agency, Unrwa, has said it will launch a polio vaccination campaign with the World Health Organization, Unicef, and other partners for more than 600,000 children under 10 years old, over the coming days. The UN is appealing to Israel and Hamas for a humanitarian ceasefire to allow humanitarian workers to carry out the immunisation campaign.
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Europe’s most senior diplomat will call for sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers, as the EU battles to rescue its credibility on the Middle East. At a meeting of the EU’s 27 foreign ministers on Thursday, Josep Borrell will make the case for sanctions against Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose inflammatory statements and behaviour have drawn international condemnation.
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At least 40,405 Palestinian people have been killed and 93,468 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Sunday.
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Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels praised attacks by Hezbollah on Israel on Sunday and renewed threats to launch their own assault in response to Israeli strikes on a port in Yemen. “We congratulate Hezbollah and its secretary-general on the great and courageous attack carried out by the resistance this morning against the Israeli enemy,” the Houthis said in a statement.
