TEHRAN: Fears of a regional Middle East war grew on Saturday after the assassination of Hamas’ political leader, blamed on the Zionist entity, triggered vows of vengeance from Iran-backed Middle East groups. The United States said it would move additional warships and fighter jets to the region as the Iran-aligned "Axis of Resistance” readied its response to the killing of Ismail Haniyeh.
The groups from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria have already been drawn into the nearly 10-month war in Gaza between the Zionist entity and the Palestinian movement Hamas. Iran on Saturday said it expects one of those groups, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, to hit deeper inside the Zionist entity and to no longer be confined to military targets.
With such talk growing, the Pentagon said it was bolstering its military presence in the Middle East to protect US personnel and defend the Zionist entity. An aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln will replace one helmed by the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the region, the Pentagon said. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also ordered additional ballistic missile defense-capable cruisers
and destroyers to the Middle East and areas under United States European Command, as well as a new fighter squadron to the Middle East.
On Friday, thousands of people in Qatar attended funeral prayers for Haniyeh, who was buried north of the capital Doha two days after his death. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Saturday said he was killed by a "short-range projectile” fired "from outside the accommodation area” where he was staying. Haniyeh had been in Iran to attend the swearing-in of President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday. The Zionist entity, accused by Hamas, Iran and others of the attack, has not directly commented on it.
The killing of the Qatar-based Haniyeh is among a series of tit-for-tat attacks since April that had already heightened fears of a regional conflagration. His death came hours after the Zionist entity struck south Beirut, killing the Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr. Haniyeh’s deputy was killed in south Beirut early this year in a strike which a US defense official said the Zionist entity carried out. In another high-profile killing, the Zionist army on Thursday confirmed that an air strike in July killed Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif in Gaza.
A Zionist airstrike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City killed at least 15 Palestinians on Saturday, hours after two strikes in the occupied West Bank killed nine Palestinians including a local Hamas commander, Hamas said. A Hamas statement said one of those killed was a commander of its Tulkarm brigades, while its ally Islamic Jihad claimed the other four men who died in the strike as its fighters. Hamas said all nine of those killed in the two Zionist attacks in the West Bank were fighters.
In the Gaza Strip, at least 15 people were killed in the Zionist strike on a school sheltering displaced persons in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, the government media office said. Earlier on Saturday, Zionist strikes in the enclave killed six people in a house in the southern area of Rafah and two others in Gaza City, Gaza health officials said. At least 39,550 Palestinians have been killed in the Zionist military campaign in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials, mostly women and children.
A senior Muslim cleric was detained on suspicion of inciting "terrorism” on Friday after he mourned Haniyeh at Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque, his lawyer told AFP. Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, 85, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem and current head of its Supreme Islamic Council, called Haniyeh a "martyr” in his sermon at the mosque in Zionist-annexed east Jerusalem, the lawyer said.
Zionist police, without naming Sabri, said they had "opened an investigation into an imam suspected of making inciting statements and supporting terrorism during a sermon given (on Friday)”. A man in his twenties was also arrested for making "inciting statements” during Friday prayers, the police statement added.
A high-level Zionist delegation has arrived in Cairo to resume Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Egyptian airport authority sources said. Haniyeh played a key role in mediated talks aimed at ending the war in Gaza. His killing raised questions about the continued viability of such negotiations which Qatar, Egypt and the United States have engaged in for months. Hamas officials but also some analysts, and protesters in the Zionist entity, have accused Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war. Far-right members crucial to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition oppose any truce.
The war in Gaza has caused widespread destruction and displaced almost the entire population of the territory where, the UN said on Friday, public health conditions "continue to deteriorate”. It said nearly 40,000 cases of hepatitis A, spread by contaminated food and water, have been reported since the war began.
Since October Hezbollah has been exchanging near-daily fire with Zionist forces, saying it is targeting military positions over the border in support of Hamas. The strike on Shukr changed the calculus, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said on Saturday. "We expect... Hezbollah to choose more targets and (strike) deeper in its response,” said the mission, quoted by Iran’s official IRNA news agency. "Secondly, that it will not limit its response to military targets.”
A Lebanese security source, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media, said a Hezbollah member was killed in a "Zionist drone” strike on a vehicle in south Lebanon on Saturday. Late on Friday, a source close to Hezbollah said the Zionist entity carried out strikes on a convoy of trucks entering Lebanon from Syria. – Agencies