Israel’s defense minister admitted for the first time that Israel killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July.
Israel Katz did this in a speech vowing to target the leaders of the Iran-backed Houthi movement in Yemen, which has been firing missiles and drones at Israel.
Haniyeh was killed in the building where he lived in the capital of Iran in an attack attributed to Israel.
Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said progress had been made on Hamas agreeing to a cease-fire in Gaza, but could not give a timeline for when an agreement would be reached.
It comes after a senior Palestinian official told the BBC that talks between Hamas and Israel were 90% complete, but important issues remained.
In his speech, Katz said that Israel will “hit hard” on the Houthis and “decimate” their leadership.
“As we did with Haniyeh, [Yahya] Sinwar, too [Hassan] Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza and Lebanon, we will do that in Hodeida and Sanaa,” he said, referring to the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas who have all been killed this year.
Haniyeh, 62, was considered the general leader of Hamas and played a key role in negotiations aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.
After his assassination, Hamas named Yahya Sinwar, its leader in Gaza and one of the main architects of the October 7 attack, as the group’s general leader.
Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces during a chance encounter in Gaza in October and the group is still in the process of electing a new leader.
Hassan Nasrallah was then the leader of the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah – he was killed in Beirut in September as Israel greatly increased its military campaign against Hezbollah, where he was trading close cross-border fire from the day after -7. The October invasion.
The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group that controls northwestern Yemen, began attacking Israeli and international ships in the Red Sea shortly after Israel began targeting Hamas in Gaza last October.
This group has vowed to continue until the end of the war in Gaza.
On Saturday, the Israeli military said its efforts to shoot down a bomb launched in Yemen were unsuccessful and the missile hit a park in Tel Aviv. A Houthi spokesman said the group hit a military milestone using a hypersonic ballistic missile.
Last week the Israelis launched strikes against what they said were Houthi militia targets, hitting ports and energy infrastructure in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa. The US and UK have also attacked Houthi targets as part of an operation to protect international shipping.
Hamas attacked Israel in October last year, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 251 people.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza that has lasted more than a year and has killed 45,317 people according to the Hamas-run health ministry in the Strip.
This figure includes 58 people killed by Israeli attacks in the past 24 hours, Hamas officials said. Local medical officials said at least 11 people were killed in three separate strikes in the al-Mawasi area, designated a “safe zone” by the Israeli army. Israel said it was targeting a Hamas fighter.
On Monday, Israel said three of its soldiers were killed in the northern Gaza Strip.
Humanitarian and rights organizations have warned of a dire situation for the people of Gaza.
On Sunday Oxfam said only 12 trucks had distributed food and water in northern Gaza in the past two and a half months and accused the Israeli army of “deliberate delays and systematic obstruction”.
“Of these three, once food and water have been delivered to the school where the people were sheltering, it is destroyed and shelled within hours,” added Oxfam.
Israeli authorities said the report “willfully and wrongly” ignored “the humanitarian efforts made by Israel in the northern Gaza Strip”.
Israel confirmed that some shipments “including food, water, and medical supplies” were sent to the northern areas of Gaza, including Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabalia, where the Israeli army has been conducting a military operation for several months, which it said was aimed at Hamas fighters who had regrouped there.
The Oxfam report comes after rights groups Amnesty accused Israel of killing people in Gaza and Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of committing “acts of genocide” by deliberately depriving Palestinian residents of Gaza of sufficient water.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry described Amnesty’s report as “false and based on lies” while a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry said Human Rights Watch had “repeated its bloodshed… The truth is the complete opposite of HRW’s lies”.
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