The funeral of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general killed alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah drew the largest crowd of top leaders in the paramilitary organisation together Tuesday for the first time since Tehran launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel.
Rumours circulated for weeks over the status of the head of the Guard’s expeditionary arm, Gen. Esmail Qaani, but the Quds Force leader was seen in a black bomber jacket wiping away tears early Tuesday morning at the body repatriation at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport.
Meanwhile, Israeli strikes in the southern Gaza Strip killed at least 15 people overnight, including six children and two women, Palestinian medical officials said Tuesday. In northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging an air and ground campaign in Jabaliya for more than a week, residents said families were still trapped in their homes and shelters.
It’s been more than a year since Hamas-led militants blew holes in Israel’s security fence and stormed in, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were fighters but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced about 90% of its population of 2.3 million people.
In solidarity with Hamas, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has exchanged cross-border fire with Israel almost daily for the past year. Israel escalated its campaign against the group in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, a general in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard directly threatened the lives of Israelis during a funeral service in Tehran for a general slain alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The comment from Gen. Ali Fadavi, a deputy commander in chief of the Guard, comes as Iran awaits a threatened retaliation by Israel over its October 1 ballistic missile attack. “That land is a small land. It’s not even as big as one of Iran’s small provinces,” Fadavi said.
“If we will, we can obliterate all the Zionists.”
Iranian officials routinely refer to Israelis as “Zionists.”
First responders recover 11 bodies from a destroyed home in northern Gaza
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinian first responders say they recovered 11 bodies, nearly all women and children, from a home destroyed in an airstrike in northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging an air and ground operation for over a week.
The Gaza Health Ministry’s ambulance service said the dead recovered Tuesday were all from the same family and included seven women and three children.
Fares Abu Hamza, head of the emergency service, said ambulances were only able to reach the area in the Jabaliya refugee camp around 12 hours after the airstrike late Monday. He said funeral prayers for the dead, which included a medic killed in Jabaliya, were held Tuesday in the courtyard of the Kamal Adwan Hospital.
First responders from the Civil Defense said its teams evacuated three families Tuesday who were stuck inside their homes in Jabaliya for several days because of heavy fighting.
Since the start of the war, the Israeli military has carried out several large operations in Jabaliya — a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — only to return months later after saying militants had regrouped there. Israel launched a large operation there on Oct. 6.
