Wednesday 6 November
22:12 Michigan's Arabs and Muslim voters sent Kamala Harris and her party a "message" after Donald Trump and Green Party candidate Jill Stein together took nearly 70 percent of the vote in Dearborn, where 55 percent of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent.
A movement that sought to punish Harris at the polls for the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza said Democrats only have themselves to blame for their preventable defeat.
In a statement today, the Abandon Harris campaign, made up of Muslim activists, said Democrats betrayed their base and abandoned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by backing Israel.
No Democrat has won the White House without Michigan since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
22:10 PSG Ultras unveiled a huge tifo ahead of the Champions League game against Atlético, in support of the Palestinians. "Free Palestine. War on the field but peace in the world.”
21:54 Hezbollah group said it launched attack drones at a base south of Tel Aviv in Israel, adding it was targeting this army position for the first time.
Fighters launched a "squadron of attack drones at the Bilu base (belonging to the reserve paratroopers brigade...) south of Tel Aviv for the first time," Hezbollah said in a statement.
Paratroopers brigades that make up the reserve component of this division participated in all Israel wars, including the war on Lebanon in 2006.
19:50 At least five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a group of civilians in the Tal Al-Zaatar area in the northern Gaza Strip, the official news agency WAFA reported.
The agency cited the Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia as saying that several casualties were brought to the facility following the attack.
Earlier, another Israeli drone strike killed four people and left multiple others injured in the Remal neighbourhood of Gaza City. The attack occurred near the Palestinian Red Crescent’s ambulance and emergency services headquarters.
“Emergency responders from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society stated that they transported the casualties to the Baptist Hospital [al-Ahli Arab Hospital] in Gaza City. As of now, no further details have been provided about the identities of the deceased or the extent of injuries sustained,” WAFA reported.
Relatives mourn the death of Atef Al-Atout, a Palestinian man who his family said was shot dead as he fled Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip toward in Gaza City, in front of the al-Maamadani hospital. AFP
18:53 Hezbollah missiles made a direct impact on Avivim in northern Israel, footage on social media revealed.
Israeli media reported that several people were wounded. A member of the Avivim settlement council said: “Large parts of the settlement are literally burning at this moment, homes, property, factories, and agricultural areas.”
Meanwhile, the body of a man was found in a field near the northern Israeli community of Kfar Masaryk. According to medics, the man was killed in a Hezbollah rocket barrage in the area earlier today.
18:50 Iraq said it would not allow its territory to be used for attacks related to conflict in the Middle East, with Iran threatening retaliation for an Israeli missile attack.
After a National Security Council meeting, a statement called reports suggesting Iraqi territory might be used as a launch point "pretexts aiming to excuse aggression against Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity."
The statement came after US news site Axios recently cited an Israeli intelligence source as saying an Iranian response could come from territory inside Iraq.
18:40 Lebanon Health Minister Firass Abiad told AFP that more than 2,600 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on the country since 23 September, adding that most of those who died were civilians.
18:39 The Israeli occupation aircraft launched a series of airstrikes on the towns of Saaideh, Bodai, Taybeh, and Taraiyya in Al-Bekaa Valley, eastern Lebanon.
This picture taken in northern Israel along the border with Lebanon, shows a barrage of rockets fired from a position in south Lebanon toward Israel. AFP
17:31 "A year of the most intense bombardment of a civilian population since World War II and the severe restriction on humanitarian aid have transformed Gaza into a dystopian horror," under the brutal Israeli war, Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) told the UN General Assembly.
Speaking of the Israeli-occupied, he said the Palestinian territories are "gripped by escalating conflict – settler violence and (Israeli) military incursions are a daily occurrence."
"Public infrastructure is destroyed deliberately, inflecting collective punishment on Palestinians," he added.
"Without intervention by member states, UNRWA will collapse, plunging millions of Palestinians into chaos," Lazzarini told the UN which created UNRWA in 1949.
General Assembly President Philémon Yang said that the UN convene at a time when the work of UNRWA "is more crucial than ever before, but we also convene at a time when its ability to operate has never been more in doubt."
He said "that international law, the UN Charter, and UN resolutions must be respected by all member states," criticizing the Israeli parliament, which prevented UNRWA from undertaking its essential work in the occupied Palestinian territories.
"Therefore, I urgently call on the government of Israel to comply with its international legal obligations and to allow UNRWA to continue its indispensable work in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, inc. East Jerusalem, as mandated by this assembly," Yang stressed.
17:15 Hezbollah says it bombed the Kfar Szold in Northern Israel for the second time with a barrage of rockets. Earlier, the group said it also targeted Safed in the Upper Galilee following evacuation warning.
16:30 The Israeli army claimed its air force fighter jets had assassinated Hussein Abdul Halim Harb, a Hezbollah battalion commander in the Khiyam area.
Hezbollah has not confirmed this information.
16:17 In his second public address since assuming leadership, Hezbollah's chief Naim Qassem the group will not rely on political efforts to halt the Israeli war. "What will stop this... war is the battlefield," he said.
“Soon it will be the enemy [Israel] who will be begging for a halt to the fighting,” he said.
“If they [Israel] are betting on a prolonged war, it will become a war of attrition. We are ready,” Qassem further said.
He explained that the Lebanese resistance group has tens of thousands of combatants ready to fight, adding that nowhere in Israel was off-limits to attacks.
"We have tens of thousands of trained resistance combatants ready to fight," Naim Qassem said in a speech marking 40 days since his predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated by Israel.
Qassem further accused Israel of seeking to defeat Hezbollah as part of a broader plan to conquer Lebanon and "reshape the Middle East."
He said that Hezbollah is open for ceasefire negotiations only once “the enemy stops its aggression.”
In his speech, Hezbollah’s leader said the group “is not basing its expectations on the results of the American elections.”
“Whether Harris wins or Trump wins, they have no value to us,” Qassem said.
16:10 Muhannad Hadi, UN Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, met with students and teachers at temporary learning spaces in Gaza. He visited a UNRWA school in Gaza City sheltering families who recently fled from besieged Jabalia under the Israeli heavy bombardment.
"It is unbearable here," he said. "There were 500 people in this school in September; now they are 1500 with no access to bathrooms."
"This is not a place for humans to survive," he continued.
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of UNRWA, will brief the UN General Assembly later in the day on the dire situation, mainly after Israel imposed a ban on the UN agency's activity in the Palestinian territories.
16:05 The UNICEF announced that 4,000 newborn babies have been cut off from lifesaving care in Gaza over the past year, because of sustained attacks on the hospitals earnestly trying to keep them alive.
The UN agency added in a statement that "because electricity supply has been cut off and because the little fuel delivered to power hospitals is woefully inadequate."
It added that "this has been especially deadly in the northern parts of the Gaza Strip."
“The Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza has become a besieged war zone,” confirming that the last neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in the north has been damaged in intense attacks in recent days.
“Vulnerable newborns and sick and wounded children in need of intensive care are being killed in tents, in incubators and in the arms of their parents. That this hasn’t galvanized enough political will to end the war, represents a fundamental crisis of our humanity.”
16:00 The leader of Hezbollah said the results of the US presidential election will have no impact on any possible ceasefire deal to end the Israeli war on Lebanon.
"We don't base our expectations for a halt of the aggression on political developments... Whether (Kamala) Harris wins or (Donald) Trump wins, it means nothing to us," he said in a pre-recorded speech before Trump announced his victory.
14:50 Lebanon said that it had filed a complaint with the United Nations' labour agency over deadly attacks on communication devices across the country in September.
Lebanese Labour Minister Mustafa Bayram called the attack an "egregious war against humanity, against technology, against work", saying his country had filed the complaint with the International Labour Organization in Geneva.
"It's a very dangerous precedent," he told journalists in the Swiss city at an event organized by the UN correspondents' association ACANU.
The escalation kicked off with sabotage attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah, which killed dozens of people and injured thousands more across Lebanon.
Israel has not officially taken responsibility for those attacks, but Bayram said it was "widely accepted internationally... that Israel was behind this heinous act."
"In a few minutes, more than 4,000 civilians fell, between martyrs and injured and maimed," he said, speaking through a translator.
14:00 Fresh Israeli strikes hit Nabatieh and Beqaa areas, southern and eastern Lebanon, according to Al Jazeera.
13:30 Lebanese rescuers pulled 30 bodies out of the rubble after a late-night Israeli strike on an apartment building in the town of Barja, the AP quoted Lebanon’s Civil Defence service as saying.
It remained unclear if there were any survivors or bodies still trapped under the rubble following the Tuesday night airstrike, which came without warning. There was no statement from the Israeli military, and the strike's intended target also was unknown.
Since the Israeli escalation in Lebanon began in 2023, at least 3,000 people have been killed, and some 13,500 have been wounded in Lebanon, about a quarter of whom are women and children, the Ministry of Health reported.
13:15 Egypt has joined 52 countries and two intergovernmental organizations in signing a letter calling the United Nations to halt arms supplies to Israel that could be used against Palestinians in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
The joint letter, directed to the UN secretary-general, the Security Council president, and the General Assembly president, was submitted on 1 November.
The initiative, supported by the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, is part of broader international efforts to pressure Israel to end its ongoing violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law.
It urges the international community to take responsibility for stopping these violations against Palestinians, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Egypt was keen to be part of the nucleus group that had been working during the past period to mobilize countries to sign the letter,” read the statement.
12:30 Hezbollah said it fired missiles at an Israeli army base near the country's main international airport on Wednesday, the first such attack in more than a month of war.
In a statement, the resistance movement said the salvo of missiles targeted the Tzrifin military base near Ben Gurion International Airport, south of the Israeli commercial hub of Tel Aviv.
Earlier, Israel’s military reported that one of a recent barrage of rockets aimed at Israel from Lebanon struck an area near the Ben Gurion Airport. There were no reports of any injuries.
11:50 Israel’s military claimed that approximately 10 projectiles were fired from Lebanon at central and northern Israel a short while ago.
Some of the projectiles were intercepted, the military said.
At least one rocket impact is reported near Ben Gurion Airport, according to the Times of Israel.
11:30 Thirty Jewish organizations issued a statement in support of UN Human Rights Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, "who has been under relentless attack from politically motivated organisations waging toxic campaigns to silence her from exposing the Israeli crimes committed against the Palestinian people and undermining her human rights mandate."
Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, has a long history of supporting the Palestinian people especially since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza.
“Some Western governments have been giving a tailwind to these smear campaigns, by accusing Ms. Albanese of antisemitism. We reject such allegations, which are unfounded and recklessly incite against Ms. Albanese, at the risk of endangering her personal safety,” the statement read.
The Jewish organisations condemned the diplomatic and military support that "many Western governments, in particular the United States and Germany, have offered to Israel’s mass killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza."
“Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the name of ‘protecting Jews’. This horrific violence will not deliver safety to Jews. On the contrary, the inaccurate and ill-fated conflation of the State of Israel with the Jewish people endangers Jews,” the statement said.
Last week, Albanese said the UN should consider suspending Israel as a member state due to its continuing “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Albanese was speaking to a UN committee on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in New York the day after she published her latest report asserting that Israel was not just committing war crimes or crimes against humanity in Gaza, but a genocide.
She was prevented from holding a briefing at the US Congress last week.
11:00 The Israeli forces stormed the city of Jenin and its camps in the occupied West Bank, destroying the infrastructure and properties.
Local sources told WAFA news agency that the occupation bulldozers destroyed and razed the streets and properties near the UNRWA school in Jenin camp.
The occupation forces also stormed the town of Burqin, southwest of Jenin, and raided and searched citizens' homes.
10:30 A senior Hamas official told AFP that the United States under Donald Trump, who claimed victory in the presidential election, must end its "blind support" for Israel in the war in Gaza.
"This blind support for the Zionist entity must end because it comes at the expense of the future of our people and the security and stability of the region," Bassem Naim, a member of Hamas' political bureau, told AFP.
09:30 A woman and her three children have been killed by an Israeli strike on a house in Beit Lahia, in the north of the Gaza Strip, WAFA news agency reported.
Local sources told WAFA that the Israeli forces also detained the deceased woman's husband.
09:15 Two Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, while eight were wounded, including children and women, in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza Strip.
09:00 Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes on several locations overnight, with a report that in Bayut Al-Siyad seven bodies were recovered from the rubble of a building.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike targeting a residential building in a town south of Beirut killed at least 20 people, Lebanon's health ministry said.
"The raid by the Israeli enemy on Barja left 20 dead," the ministry said of the raid on the coastal town around 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of the capital, adding that rescue operations were underway.
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