A summary of today's developments
Israel will respond to Iran’s weekend missile and drone attack on its territory, the military chief of staff said on Monday. “This launch of so many missiles, cruise missiles, and drones into Israeli territory will be met with a response,” chief of staff Herzi Halevi said, speaking from the Nevatim air force base in southern Israel, which sustained some damage in the attack.
Iran does not want increased tensions but will respond immediately and more strongly than before if Israel retaliates, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian told his British counterpart on Monday, according to Iranian state media. British prime minister Rishi Sunak said he would soon speak with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on how to prevent escalation in the region after Iran’s drone and missile attack.
Israeli settlers killed two Palestinians on Monday in the occupied West Bank province of Nablus, Salah Bani Jaber, the mayor of Aqraba, told Reuters.
Israel has moved in a “significant way” but Hamas is the barrier to a deal that would see fighting in Gaza paused and hostages released, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. Hamas rejected the latest proposed deal and has said any new hostage deal must bring about an end to the Gaza war and withdrawal of all Israeli forces, Reuters reports.
A UN report said that Israel has destroyed over 3,000 buildings within a 1km “buffer zone” that it is creating inside the Gaza Strip along the territory’s border with Israel.
France’s president Emmanuel Macron has said that France will do everything to avoid an escalation in the Middle East. He told the BFMTV news channel: “We will do everything to avoid a conflagration - that is to say an escalation. “We need to be by Israel’s side to ensure its protection to the maximum, but also to call for a limit to avoid an escalation.”
The Netherlands said it will reopen its embassy in Tehran on Tuesday after closing it for two days for safety reasons. It added in the statement that it does not exclude a new closure of its embassy.
The IDF has said that four of its soldiers were wounded overnight near the UN-drawn blue line that separates Israel and Lebanon. In a statement it said the injuries were caused by “an explosion of an unknown source” and that “The soldiers were evacuated to a hospital to receive medical treatment.”
Updated
Portugal’s new prime minister told his Spanish counterpart on Monday his country will “not go as far” as Spain in its plan to recognise a Palestinian state without a concerted European Union approach.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who has visited several countries in the past few days on a diplomatic campaign to garner support for the initiative, reiterated his plan to recognise Palestinian statehood in the coming months.
But Luis Montenegro, who met Sanchez in Madrid, said that while Portugal will support a full U.N. membership for a Palestinian state in an upcoming General Assembly vote, it would wait for the EU to work out a common stance on the matter before moving forward.
“We don’t go as far as other governments... because we maintain that understanding must be built on a multilateral basis within the European Union and the United Nations,” Montenegro told reporters.
Both leaders called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza where death toll from Israel’s offensive to rout out Hamas has been mounting, prompting calls for a lasting solution for peace in the region. Both also condemned Iran’s missile attack on Israel over the weekend.
