A Hezbollah member of Lebanon's parliament said on Thursday the Israeli military had not so far captured any villages in southern Lebanon.
Hassan Fadlallah also told reporters that Hezbollah's leadership was carefully coordinating with the speaker of Lebanon's parliament, Nabih Berri, in efforts to secure a ceasefire in the fighting with Israeli forces. (Reuters)
Israel has stopped processing requests from traders to import food to Gaza, according to 12 people involved in the trade, choking off a track that for the past six months supplied more than half of the besieged Palestinian territory's provisions.
Since Oct. 11, Gaza-based traders who were importing food from Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank have lost access to a system introduced in spring by Cogat, the Israeli government body that oversees aid and commercial shipments, and have received no reply to attempts to contact the agency, the sources said.
The shift has driven the flow of goods arriving in Gaza to its lowest level since the start of the war, a Reuters analysis of official Israeli data shows. The details of the halt in commercial goods into Gaza have not been previously reported.
Cogat did not respond to Reuters' questions about commercial food imports and aid to Gaza. The agency says it does all it can to ensure that enough aid enters the coastal enclave, and that Israel does not prevent the entry of humanitarian aid. It rejects allegations Israel has blocked supplies.
Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 16, the overall flow of shipments to Gaza - including both aid and commercial goods - fell to a daily average of 29 trucks, according to Cogat statistics.
That compares with a daily average of 175 trucks between May and September, the data shows. Commercial shipments -- goods bought by local traders, trucked in after direct approval by Cogat, and then sold in marketplaces in Gaza -- accounted for about 55 per cent of the total during that period. (Reuters)
At least 19 Palestinians including children were killed on Thursday after an Israeli strike hit a school in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip that is sheltering displaced people, a Gaza health ministry official told Reuters.
Dozens were also injured in the strike, said the official, Medhat Abbas, adding: "There is no water to extinguish the fire. There is nothing." (Reuters)
Speaking at the funeral of slain Major General Abbas Nilforoushan, Major General Salami of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said that the earlier volley of missiles launched by Tehran on October 3 was merely a warning to Israel, and that further escalations, if any, would be met by a much harsher response.