US carries out fresh strikes on Houthi targets, US officials say
The US has carried out another round of strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, US media is reporting citing US officials.
The US military fired a wave of ship- and submarine-launch missile strikes against Houthi-controlled sites on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported. The strikes come after the rebel group launched a drone earlier on Wednesday that hit a US-owned bulk carrier in the Gulf of Aden.
The strikes mark the fourth time in recent days that the US has directly targeted the group in Yemen.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public yet.
Al Jazeera reports that the death toll from Israeli shelling in Rafah overnight has risen to 16, including small children.
Earlier the broadcaster had reported that it verified footage showing the bodies of three children killed in the Israeli shelling of a house east of Rafah being brought to Abu Youssef Al Najjar hospital.
The US military has officially confirmed that it carried out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, saying that it “conducted strikes on 14 Iran-backed Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired in Houthi controlled areas in Yemen” just before midnight on Wednesday. In a statement posted on X, the military said:
These missiles on launch rails presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and US Navy ships in the region and could have been fired at any time.
It said the strikes and “other actions we have taken” would “degrade the Houthi’s capabilities to continue their reckless attacks on international and commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, and the Gulf of Aden.”
US Central Command commander, Michael Erik Kurilla said:
The actions by the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists continue to endanger international mariners and disrupt the commercial shipping lanes in the Southern Red Sea and adjacent waterways. We will continue to take actions to protect the lives of innocent mariners and we will always protect our people.”
U.S. CENTCOM Strikes Houthi Terrorist Missile Launchers
In the context of ongoing multi-national efforts to protect freedom of navigation and prevent attacks on U.S. and partner maritime traffic in the Red Sea, on Jan. 17 at approximately 11:59 p.m. (Sanaa time), U.S. Central… pic.twitter.com/MMCQbzr1f7
More on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, from where already displaced Palestinians fled late Tuesday as Israeli forces attacked nearby, prompting fears the largest hospital still partially functioning in the territory may be forced to close.
Palestinian health officials said seven people were killed by Israeli air strikes on homes near the hospital overnight to Wednesday. The UN agency OCHA said that Israeli forces withdrew from the area at around 7am on Wednesday and that initial reports and video footage showed that the nearby Al Namsawi cemetery had been destroyed and some graves empty, with bodies reportedly missing.
In a statement the Israeli army claimed that it had come under fire from the area, according to AFP.
Injured Palestinians, including children, are taken to the Nasser hospital after the Israeli attack on the house of the Abu Aram family in Khan Younis on 12 January. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The aid agency Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said Israeli forces had “heavily bombed the area close to the hospital with no prior evacuation order, causing patients and many of the thousands of displaced civilians, who had sought refuge in Nasser, to flee in a panic.”
The agency’s head of mission for Palestine, Leo Cans, said during a visit to the hospital on Tuesday: “The fighting is very close. We hear bombings around and a lot of shooting. Yesterday [Monday], there was an airstrike 150 metres from the entrance of the hospital that killed eight people and injured more than 80 people. Among those were two boys, four years old and five years old who got killed.”
He said the hospital was operating at 300% capacity, adding “the situation is catastrophic. There are way too many patients for the staff to handle”.
During a visit to the hospital yesterday, MSF Head of Mission for Palestine Leo Cans said that Nasser, now Gaza’s largest functioning health facility, was operating at 300% capacity, adding "the situation is catastrophic. There are way too many patients for the staff to handle”. pic.twitter.com/I9b83pW3xB
A bit more on the latest US strikes on Yemen. The Houthi-controlled Saba news agency says US and British aircraft carried out strikes on the governates of Hodeidah, Taiz, Al-Bayda and Saada, according to Reuters.
The New York Times has meanwhile reported that US navy ships used Tomahawk cruise missiles in the strikes and “destroyed missiles and their launchers as the Houthis were preparing to fire them” citing anonymous US officials.
The AP reported that the strikes were launched from the Red Sea and hit more than a dozen sites.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken told Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that there is no military solution to Hamas and that the Israeli leader needs to recognize that or history will repeat itself during his last trip to the Middle East, the US broadcaster NBC has reported citing anonymous US officials.
Netanyahu was reportedly unmoved. He also rejected an offer by Saudi Arabia to normalise relations as part of a Gaza reconstruction agreement if Israel agrees to provide Palestinians with a pathway to statehood, the officials said.
The Biden administration is reportedly increasingly frustrated with the Israeli prime minister and is laying the groundwork for a post-Netanyahu government with other Israeli and civil society leaders.
As part of that strategy and in an attempt to work around Netanyahu, Blinken met individually with members of his war cabinet and other Israeli leaders, including opposition leader and former prime minister Yair Lapid, the officials told NBC.
The broadcaster wrote further:
The United States is now following up with Arab leaders on Blinken’s discussions, but the senior administration officials acknowledged that Biden’s lofty hopes of reshaping the Middle East are now inextricably linked to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
As a result, one senior administration official conceded, the president’s aspirations for a durable regional peace may have to await a post-Netanyahu government.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken meets Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) in Tel Aviv last week. Photograph: Government Press Office/EPA
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have been holding a candlelit vigil in Ashington DC for the hostages taken by Hamas during the 7 October attack on Israel after meeting with their relatives:
US House Speaker Mike Johnson leads a candlelight vigil with the families of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza on Wednesday. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Jonathan Polin, father of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, speaks during a bipartisan press conference by lawmakers on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Wednesday. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
US carries out fresh strikes on Houthi targets, US officials say
The US has carried out another round of strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, US media is reporting citing US officials.
The US military fired a wave of ship- and submarine-launch missile strikes against Houthi-controlled sites on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported. The strikes come after the rebel group launched a drone earlier on Wednesday that hit a US-owned bulk carrier in the Gulf of Aden.
The strikes mark the fourth time in recent days that the US has directly targeted the group in Yemen.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public yet.
Israeli forces kill 10 in West Bank, including two children
Israeli forces killed 10 people including two children in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, according to various sources including the UN, the Palestinian health ministry and the Israeli army, while two paramedics were injured and another two detained.
The UN agency OCHA said six people were killed, including two children, in an airstrike on Tulkarem refugee camp. In its daily update on hostilities it reported:
In the early morning, Israeli forces raided the camp, where clashes erupted between Israeli forces and Palestinians, including an exchange of gunfire and the use of explosive devices by the latter was reported.
Subsequently, an Israeli airstrike targeted a group of Palestinians, killing four, including two children.
During the operation, seven Palestinians, including two PCRS paramedics, and one Israeli soldier had been injured.
An ambulance was severely damaged by shrapnel and two Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) paramedics were detained by Israeli forces.
The Israeli military confirmed it carried out an air strike during the Tulkarem raid, adding that “a number of terrorists were killed in the strike”.
A separate airstrike near Balata refugee camp, east of the city of Nablus, killed five fighters with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah party, the brigade said in a statement.
The group and the Israeli army said Ahmed Abdullah Abu Shalal, a Palestinian militant, had been killed, with Israel saying it had averted a “terrorist attack” he was planning.
OCHA said Israeli forces took the bodies of four of the dead while a fifth was “incinerated” in the strike. It also said that Israeli forces reportedly prevented PRCS ambulances from accessing the location and opened fire at them.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 355 Palestinians including 90 children since Hamas’ 7 October attack on Israel, according to OCHA.
Israeli forces in Tulkarem on Wednesday. Israeli forces have badly damaged Palestinian homes and infrastructure during regular raids in the occupied West Bank since the 7 October Hamas attacks. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Patients 'waiting to die' at hospitals in Gaza, WHO official says
A World Health Organization official has described dire conditions in the Gaza Strip’s remaining hospitals, where patients are “waiting to die” due to extreme shortages of staff and supplies. AFP reports:
Emergency medical team coordinator Sean Casey said that during some five weeks he spent in the war-torn Palestinian territory, he saw hospital patients “every day with severe burns, with open fractures waiting hours or days” for treatment.
“They would often ask me for food or water – that demonstrates the level of desperation that we see,” Casey told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.
He said he was only able to visit six of Gaza’s 16 functioning hospitals, out of 36 that existed before the war broke out.
“What I’ve seen personally is a rapid deterioration of the health system alongside a rapidly increasing level of humanitarian aid and diminishing level of humanitarian access particularly to areas in the north of the Strip.”
He described seeing patients in the north who were “basically waiting to die in a hospital that has no fuel, no power, no water.”
“We tried every single day for seven days to deliver fuel and supplies to the north to Gaza City,” Casey said. “Every day, those requests for coordinated movements were denied.”
The hospitals are facing a deluge of patients while operating with minimal staff, many of whom – like the vast majority of Gaza’s population – have been displaced from their homes, Casey said.
“Hospital directors were telling me how their surgeons, plastic surgeon, for example, could not do surgery, because he was out collecting sticks to burn his firewood to cook for his family.” …
Echoing similar calls by WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Casey said the most critical need in Gaza “is really a ceasefire.”
“Everything short of that is simply addressing needs on a day by day basis.”
In the south, Casey said he visited the Nasser medical complex, where “they had only 30 percent of their staff remaining and about 200 percent of their bed capacity – so patients everywhere in the corridors on the floor.”
“I went to the burn unit where there was one physician caring for 100 patients,” he said.
The “humanitarian catastrophe that’s unfolding every day is getting worse and worse” Casey said, in addition to “the collapse of the health system day by day.”
Al Jazeera has reported that at least six Palestinians including three children have been killed in Israeli attacks overnight to Thursday.
The broadcaster said it had verified footage showing the bodies of three children arriving at Abu Youssef Al Najjar hospital after Israeli forces shelled a house belonging to the al-Zamili family, in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza.
It also reported the deaths of another three Palestinians killed in an attack near Abu Husni street in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, citing the Palestinian news agency Wafa. An unknown number of people were also reportedly killed in an Israeli attack of the home of the al-Huti family in the Shaboura refugee camp.
Wafa also reported that two Palestinians were killed and two injured after an Israeli attack on a gathering of people in Rafah – it was not immediately clear if this was the same as the attack on the al-Zamili family home or a separate incident.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of children killed in Israeli attacks at Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah, Gaza earlier this week. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
British foreign secretary David Cameron has met his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian at the World Economic Forum, according to Reuters.
Cameron condemned Iran’s attack on Erbil in Iraq earlier this week, in which UK-Iraqi dual national Karam Mikhael was among those killed, the foreign office said in a statement.
Cameron also made it clear that the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea are “illegal and unacceptable”, the foreign office said. The foreign secretary added that Iran must use its influence with the Houthis to prevent further threats.
Iran must cease supplying the Houthis with weapons and intelligence and use its influence to stop Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.
Iran must also stop using the regional situation as cover to act recklessly and violate others’ sovereignty.
