Live Briefing: Top Hezbollah spokesman killed; Israeli attack kills 70 in north Gaza, official says (original) (raw)

An Israeli airstrike on a densely populated neighborhood in central Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top spokesman Sunday morning, reported al-Mayadeen, a Lebanese news network aligned with the militant group.

Mohammad Afif was killed in Ras al-Nabaa, where many people from the heavily bombarded areas of Beirut’s southern suburbs had sought refuge in recent weeks. The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on reports of the strike.

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BEIRUT — An Israeli strike Sunday on the central Beirut neighborhood of Ras al-Nabaa killed Mohammad Afif, Hezbollah’s top spokesman and head of media relations, the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese news network al-Mayadeen reported.
The daylight airstrike hit a building owned by the Syria-affiliated Arab Socialist Baath Party, the party’s secretary general said. Afif was “by chance in the targeted building,” Ali Hijazi said.
The attack killed at least one and injured three others, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said. In reporting casualties, the agency does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the report. The IDF did not issue an evacuation order before the strike.
Afif,who was prominent within Hezbollah for two decades, was a close affiliate of the organization’s former leader, Hasan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike in September. In October, Afif was conducting a news briefing in Beirut’s southern suburbs when the IDF struck a building hundreds of meters away.
“To the enemy, you will not win the war with your air superiority or by destroying or killing civilians,” he told reporters last week. “As long as you are unable to fight on the ground, as long as you are unable to advance in on the ground and as long as you are unable to retain any actual control of the land, you will never achieve your political goals.”

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TEL AVIV — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz planned to issue a portion of approved draft notices to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community Sunday, escalating a showdown between the minority community, which holds outsize political power, and the Israeli majority, hundreds of thousands of whom have been called up to serve in Israel’s wars.
The Israel Defense Forces will send 1,000 of the 7,000 enlistment orders that Katz approved last week, part of a bureaucratic effort that analysts say aims to bide time as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu negotiates a path toward formalizing a renewed ultra-Orthodox exemption into law.
Debates over the exemption, which dates to Israel’s 1948 founding but expired this spring, reached a climax over the past year as hundreds of thousands of reservists were called up to wage Israel’s longest war in decades.
A small, fringe ultra-Orthodox group planned to block a road in the town of Bnei Brak on Sunday afternoon in protest, and newspapers from the area called on ultra-Orthodox students at seminaries not to show up at recruitment offices.
In a Sunday X post, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the ultra-Orthodox stance “a national disgrace, an insult to combat soldiers and a public call to break the law.”
The more mainstream part of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, which has not called for mass protests, is waiting for the Israeli parliament to advance a law that would definitively exempt them from military service and retroactively cancel the thousands of draft notices that the IDF has sent out.
Ultra-Orthodox partners in Netanyahu’s coalition have threatened to collapse the government if legislation reflecting their demands is not passed, which would probably lead to fresh elections. Netanyahu has lost a large amount of support from his base since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and as he fails to secure the release of nearly 100 hostages, dozens of whom are believed to be alive, from Gaza.
Netanyahu appointed Katz, a government minister with little military experience, this month to replace Yoav Gallant, who refused to advance new legislation enabling ultra-Orthodox military exemption.
In the weeks following Oct. 7, Israel saw full compliance in its enlistment rate. Now, they are at 85 percent, Israel Defense Forces spokesman Nadav Shoshani said in a Thursday news briefing.
The IDF, waging a war that could last years, is making arrangements to lengthen mandatory military service and require the ultra-Orthodox to serve. “This war is long; it requires a lot of manpower,” Shoshani said. “Israel is not a very big country, and that remains a challenge for us.”

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About 70 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on the Beit Lahia area of northern Gaza early Nov. 17, director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry said. (Video: Obtained by Reuters)
TEL AVIV — Israeli airstrikes on Beit Lahia in northern Gaza on Sunday morning killed about 70 people, Munir al-Bursh, director general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, told The Washington Post.
Dozens of people remained trapped under the rubble, local media said. The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday that “several strikes were conducted” overnight against militant targets in the area and that it tried to evacuate residents.
In total, more than 90 were killed across Gaza in the past day, including two dozen in strikes in the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps, Bursh said.
Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital — one of the last remaining medical facilities in northern Gaza — said in a social media post Sunday that “the situation is catastrophic in every sense of the word.”
There are no more working ambulances in the north, and the Gaza Civil Defense said last month it was forced to stop working there because of Israeli attacks on its teams and equipment. Abu Safiya said the shortage of resources meant rescuers were unable to help those trapped under the rubble.
A woman in Beit Lahia, who has been displaced in the north 13 times during the war, told The Post that there was shelling “all night long” and that drones called people to head to the west of Gaza City, which is farther south.
The woman, who gave her name as Reem but declined to share her last name for security reasons, said: “We don’t know what’s right or wrong, to stay or leave.”
Israel intensified military operations in northern Gaza in early October, besieging and hitting targets there, in what it says is to stop Hamas militants from regrouping. U.N. and aid officials say that areas of the enclave are on the edge of humanitarian collapse as a result.
Aid agencies have struggled to enter the north, which is under the control of Israeli forces. A planned U.N. delivery of medical supplies and assistance to Kamal Adwan Hospital was blocked on Saturday, said Bisma Akbar, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization.
The WHO asked to send an emergency medical team of two surgeons, two nurses and one gynecologist, along with fuel and medical supplies to the hospital but received IDF permission only for the medical supplies. “We had to cancel the mission as only half the objective was approved,” Akbar said.
In the wake of Sunday’s deadly airstrikes, the agency is attempting again to carry out the delivery, she added.