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Biden, Harris briefed on Middle East situation as fear of Iran retaliation grows
The US national security team briefed President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on US efforts to “support the defense of Israel” and “continued diplomatic efforts to de-escalate regional tension”. Israel confirmed it would send a delegation to a new round of Gaza peace talks in Doha set for Thursday, with US, Egypt, and Qatar officials also set to attend. Hamas representatives will not attend, but are expected to be briefed by mediators afterward. Israel braces for a possible retaliatory strike from Iran following the killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month. Read our live blog to see how all the day’s events unfolded.
Issued on: 14/08/2024 – 05:39
Modified: 14/08/2024 – 17:41
2 min
US President Joe Biden speaks to participants of the White House Creator Economy Conference in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on August 14, 2024 in Washington, DC.
US President Joe Biden speaks to participants of the White House Creator Economy Conference in the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on August 14, 2024 in Washington, DC. © Anna Moneymaker, AFP/Getty Images
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Summary:
An Israeli delegation will be attending peace talks in Doha on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu confirmed, along with officials from the US, Egypt and Qatar.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Wednesday it would not take part in a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks Thursday in Qatar, dimming hopes for a negotiated truce that could hold back an expected Iranian attack on Israel. Mediators are, however, expected to brief Hamas after the talks.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is set to meet with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara following a visit to Moscow.
At least 39,965 Palestinians have been killed and 92,294 wounded in Israel’s war in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run enclave. The Hamas-led October 7 attacks resulted in the deaths of more than 1,190 people, mostly civilians, according to official Israeli figures. Some 250 people were taken hostage, with about 120 remaining in Gaza. Many have been declared dead by Israeli authorities.
Last to first
7 hours ago
Hamas losing faith in US as mediator in Gaza cease-fire talks, group official says
In an hourlong interview, Hamdan accused Israel of not engaging in good faith and said the group does not believe the U.S. can or will apply pressure on Israel to seal a deal.
Hamdan claimed that more than once Hamas accepted in whole or in large part a proposal put to them by the mediators only to have Israel reject it out of hand, ignore it, or launch major new military operations in the days that followed. On one occasion, one day after Hamas accepted a cease-fire proposal, Israel launched a new operation in Rafah in southern Gaza. Israel said the proposal remained far from its demands.
Hamdan said that CIA director William Burns told Hamas via mediators at the time that Israel would agree to the deal. But, he said, “the Americans were unable to convince the Israelis. I think they did not pressure the Israelis.”
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9 hours ago
Blinken and Qatar PM warn all sides not to ‘undermine’ Gaza truce talks
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Qatar’s prime minister on Wednesday warned all sides not to undermine Gaza ceasefire talks set to open in the Gulf nation, in a veiled warning to Iran, Hamas and Israel.
Blinken and Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani in a telephone call stated that “no party in the region should take actions that would undermine efforts to reach a deal,” a US State Department statement said.
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9 hours ago
Palestinian Authority president Abbas and Turkish Presiden Erdogan discuss Gaza ceasefire
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told visiting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday that Turkey will continue to support the Palestinian cause and push the international community to increase pressure on Israel, his office said.
The two leaders discussed recent developments and the steps to be taken for a lasting ceasefire and peace in Gaza, Erdogan’s office said in a post on X.
Erdogan condemned Israel’s war in Gaza, the statement said, accusing some Western countries of remaining silent and continuing to support Israel.
Erdogan also told Abbas that all countries, especially in the Muslim world, should step up efforts to ensure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
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11 hours ago
White House says Gaza talks to go as planned despite Hamas absence
The United States expects Gaza ceasefire talks to go ahead as planned despite a decision by the Hamas militant group not to attend, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Wednesday.
CIA Director Bill Burns and US Middle East envoy Brett McGurk are to represent the United States at the talks on Thursday in Qatar, Jean-Pierre said.
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11 hours ago
Three killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon
Lebanon’s health ministry said three people were killed Wednesday in Israeli strikes on the country’s south, the latest cross-border violence amid heightened regional tensions and fear of a full-blown war.
The Lebanese health ministry said in a statement that an “Israeli enemy” strike on the southern town of Marjayoun killed two people and wounded four others, noting the toll was provisional.
The official National News Agency said an “enemy drone targeted a car” in the town square, a usually busy area home to shops.
The health ministry also said one person was killed and another wounded in an “Israeli” strike in south Lebanon’s Blida village.
The Israeli military said in a statement that its air force had “struck Hezbollah military structures” including in the Blida area.
Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, has traded near daily fire with the Israeli army since the Palestinian militant group’s October 7 attack on Israel which triggered the Gaza war.
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11 hours ago
CIA director to participate in Gaza peace talks
US Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns will be in Qatar for talks on a ceasefire in Gaza on Thursday, a source familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Burns would be accompanied by Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East and Africa. The CIA declined to comment on the matter in line with its policy of not disclosing the director’s travel.
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14 hours ago
Israeli spy chiefs to attend Qatar peace talks, says PM office
The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, David Barnea, and Shin Bet security service chief Ronen Bar will participate in Gaza truce negotiations in Doha, the prime minister’s office said Wednesday.
“The head of the Mossad, the head of the Shin Bet, Nitzan Alon and Ophir Falk” will make up the Israeli delegation for Thursday’s meeting in Qatar, Omer Dostri, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanayhu, told AFP.
Alon coordinates issues related to hostages, and Falk is a political adviser to Netanyahu.
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14 hours ago
UK foreign minister ‘strongly condemns’ Israeli minister visit to Al-Aqsa mosque
Britain strongly condemns Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound known to Jews as Temple Mount, British foreign minister David Lammy said on Wednesday.
“The UK strongly condemns Minister Ben-Gvir’s deliberately provocative visit to Jerusalem’s Holy Sites,” Lammy wrote on X.
“Such actions undermine the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s role as custodian of the sites and the longstanding Status Quo arrangements,” he added.
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14 hours ago
Officials from Israel, Qatar, US and Egypt to meet for ceasefire talks in Doha
Gaza ceasefire negotiations are set to take place in Doha on Thursday, involving officials from Israel, Qatar, the US and Egypt, an official briefed on talks told Reuters.
The mediators expect to consult with Hamas following the Doha ceasefire talks, the official added.
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14 hours ago
Netanyahu confirms Israeli team to attend Doha talks
Israel’s prime minister has confirmed an Israeli team will attend Thursday’s talks in Doha, a statement said on Wednesday, where mediators will try to broker a Gaza war ceasefire and hostage release.
“Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has approved the departure of the Israeli delegation to Doha tomorrow, as well as the mandate for conducting the negotiations,” a statement from his office said.
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15 hours ago
German foreign ministry condemns Israeli minister visit to Al-Aqsa mosque
Germany on Wednesday condemned a visit by two Israeli ministers to the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, known to Jews as Temple Mount, and said it expects the Israeli government to halt deliberate provocations.
“We reject unilateral steps that jeopardise the historical status quo of the holy sites in Jerusalem,” the foreign ministry in Berlin posted on social media platform X.
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16 hours ago
Gaza truce talks to be held in Qatar on Thursday, AFP sources say
Gaza ceasefire talks will be held in the Qatari capital on Thursday, two sources close to the negotiations said, while it remains unclear if Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas will participate.
A source close to Hamas and a second source close to the talks confirmed the Doha meeting, which CIA Director William Burns is also scheduled to take part in, according to a third US source familiar with the negotiations.
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16 hours ago
Israel approves new settlement on UNESCO site in occupied West Bank
Israel has approved a new settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank, its far-right finance minister said on Wednesday.
Bezalel Smotrich, who also heads civil affairs at the defence ministry, said his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion”, a bloc of settlements south of Jerusalem.
All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967, are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have Israeli planning permission.
“No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements,” Smotrich, who lives in a settlement, posted on X.
“We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground.”
The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now denounced the plan, calling it a “wholesale attack” on an area “renowned for its ancient terraces and sophisticated irrigation systems, evidence of thousands of years of human activity”.
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18 hours ago
Palestinian newborn twins killed as father obtained birth certificates
Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan had just picked up birth certificates for his newly-born twins when he found out they had been killed, along with his wife and her mother, by an Israeli strike on the Gaza apartment where they were sheltering.
He waved the laminated documents, supposed to signify rare joy in the besieged Palestinian enclave, as a man held him while he wept at the morgue where their bodies were brought.
“My wife is gone, my two babies and my mother-in-law. I was told it’s a tank shell on the apartment they were in, in a house we were displaced to,” said Abu Al-Qumsan, 31, recalling the devastating phone call from people in the neighbourhood.
He and others carried his boy and girl, Asser and Ayssel, who were wrapped in white shrouds – a common sight in Gaza, where Israel’s land and air campaign has put hundreds of thousands of people regularly on the move in search of shelter.
A man prayed as the bodies were placed in the back of a car and a crowd gathered and people looked on from the balcony of one of Gaza’s overwhelmed emergency rooms, at the Al-Aqsa Maryrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the centre of the coastal strip.
“Today, it was registered in history that the occupation army targets newborn children who are barely four days old, twins along with their mother and grandmother,” hospital doctor Khalil al-Daqran said.
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18 hours ago
Hamas to stay out of Gaza truce talks
The Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Wednesday it would not take part in a new round of Gaza ceasefire talks slated for Thursday in Qatar, dimming hopes for a negotiated truce that Iranian sources say could hold back an Iranian attack on Israel.
The US has said it expects indirect talks to go ahead as planned in Qatar’s capital Doha on Thursday, and that a ceasefire agreement was still possible. However Axios reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed a trip to the Middle East that had been expected to begin on Tuesday.
Three senior Iranian officials have said that only a ceasefire deal in Gaza would hold Iran back from direct retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on its soil last month.
The Israeli government said it would send a delegation to Thursday’s talks, but Hamas requested a workable plan to implement a proposal it has already accepted rather than more talks.
“Hamas is committed to the proposal presented to it on July 2, which is based on the U.S. Security Council resolution and the Biden speech and the movement is prepared to immediately begin discussion over a mechanism to implement it,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
“Going to new negotiation allows the occupation to impose new conditions and employ the maze of negotiation to conduct more massacres,” he added.
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20 hours ago
In Beirut, US envoy says ‘no more time to waste’ on Gaza ceasefire
Visiting US envoy Amos Hochstein warned Wednesday that the clock was ticking for a Gaza ceasefire that would also end 10 months of cross-border exchanges between Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Israel.
Hochstein told a Beirut news conference that he and parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally, discussed “the framework agreement that’s on the table for a Gaza ceasefire, and he and I agreed there is no more time to waste and there’s no more valid excuses from any party for any further delay”.
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20 hours ago
Health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says war death toll at 39,965
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Wednesday that at least 39,965 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Palestinian militants, now in its 11th month.
The toll includes 36 deaths in the previous 24 hours, according to ministry figures, which also list 92,294 people as having been wounded in the Gaza Strip since the war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7.
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20 hours ago
Palestinian Authority President Abbas to meet Erdogan
Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas is set to meet with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday in Ankara, a day after a visit to Moscow.
Abbas is due to meet with Erdogan at 1530 GMT at the presidential palace, according to the Turkish leader’s itinerary.
Erdogan has been a fierce critic of Israel’s conduct in the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks, dubbing Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “the butcher of Gaza”.
He also criticised the Western world for failure to pressure Israel to stop the war.
In July, Erdogan chastised Abbas for not responding to his invitation to visit Turkey. Abbas added a trip to Ankara after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday.
He will address the Turkish parliament in a special session dedicated to the Palestinian issue on Thursday.
Abbas, who heads the Fatah Palestinian movement, a rival to Hamas, had already visited Turkey at Erdogan’s invitation in early March.
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21 hours ago
Air France and Transavia say they expect to resume flights to Beirut Thursday
Air France and its Transavia subsidiary expect to resume service to Beirut Thursday, which has been suspended since July 29 because of tensions in the Middle East, the French carrier said Wednesday.
“At this stage, and subject to the evolution of the security situation at destination, the airline plans to resume its flights between Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Beirut on Thursday, August 15, 2024,” Air France said in a communique.
“The continuation of operations will be subject to a daily assessment of the local situation,” it added.
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a day ago
Israel forces kill five Palestinians in West Bank strikes, raid
Israeli troops killed five Palestinians in air strikes and a raid in the north of the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, sources on both sides said.
The Israeli army said it “carried out air strikes on several armed terrorists” in the town of Tammun, five kilometres from Tubas.
Tubas governor Ahmad Saad told AFP that four Palestinians were killed in Tammun and one in Tubas.
“The (Israeli) forces are withholding the bodies of the five martyrs, and when we inquired with the liaison office, we were officially informed about the five martyrs,” Saad said.
Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported that “the army entered Tubas at dawn and shot and killed a young man hiding in his home”.
The Israeli army confirmed it had launched a “counterterrorism operation” in the city, during which it “eliminated one terrorist” and “hit others during an exchange of fire”.
It said its troops had “arrested wanted suspects and located and confiscated weapons”.
Earlier, the Israeli police said they had shot dead a Palestinian teenager who was “climbing the wall” separating Jerusalem from the West Bank to “throw Molotov cocktails”.
The 16-year-old was taken to hospital for treatment but was pronounced dead, the police said in a statement shortly after midnight Tuesday.
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a day ago
Israeli strikes kill at least 17 in Gaza overnight, Palestinians say
Palestinian health officials say Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday killed at least 17 people, including five children and their parents.
One strike hit a family home late Tuesday in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, which dates back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. It killed five children, ranging in age from 2 to 11, and their parents, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
An Associated Press reporter who saw the bodies arrive said they had been dismembered by the blast and that the 2-year-old had been decapitated.
In the nearby Maghazi refugee camp, a strike on a home early Wednesday killed four people and wounded others, the hospital said.
In the southern city of Khan Younis, the Health Ministry’s emergency service said first responders recovered the bodies of four men who were killed in a strike on a residential tower late Tuesday.
Two more people were killed in an Israeli strike on a house in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, according to the emergency service. The strike also wounded five people.
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13 Aug 23:27
UCLA can’t allow protesters to block Jewish students from campus, judge rules
A US federal judge ruled Tuesday that the University of California, Los Angeles, cannot allow pro-Palestinian protesters to block Jewish students from accessing classes and other parts of campus.
The preliminary injunction marks the first time a US judge has ruled against a university over the demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses earlier this year.
US District Judge Mark Scarsi’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed in June by three Jewish students at UCLA. The students alleged that they experienced discrimination on campus during the protest because of their faith and that UCLA failed to ensure access to campus for all Jewish students.
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13 Aug 23:16
US approves $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel amid threat of wider war
The US has approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets and advanced air-to-air missiles, the State Department announced Tuesday.
Congress was notified of the impending sale, which includes more than 50 F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs, 120 mm tank ammunition and high explosive mortars and tactical vehicles and comes at a time of intense concern that Israel may become involved in a wider Middle East war.
However, the weapons are not expected to get to Israel anytime soon, they are contracts that will take years to fulfill. Much of what is being sold is to help Israel increase its military capability in the long term, the earliest systems being delivered under the contract aren’t expected until the 2026 timeframe.
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Yesterday’s key developments:
The United Nations, the EU and France condemned Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Tuesday, saying it violated the historical status quo of holy places in Jerusalem.
The US has approved $20 billion in arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets and advanced air-to-air missiles, the State Department announced Tuesday. The sale comes as Biden presses Israel and Hamas to reach a ceasefire after 10 months of bloodshed, although the weapons could take years to reach Israel.
An 18-year-old man shot dead by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank on Monday had been freed during the November truce in the Gaza war, a Palestinian prisoners watchdog has said.
About casualty figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry:
Gaza’s health ministry collects data from the enclave’s hospitals and the Palestinian Red Crescent. For more on the health ministry’s casualty figures, click here.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)
