Hezbollah fires rockets into Israel; Blinken travels to Qatar

The latest bout of strikes and retaliations comes at a particularly key moment in the negotiations over a cease-fire and hostage exchange deal in Gaza as mediators study the Hamas response. Hamas has described its reply as “positive.” The Biden administration has yet to publicly comment but Israeli media, citing unnamed officials, have characterized it as a rejection.

The Israeli strike Tuesday on the southern Lebanese town of Jwaya killed Talib Abdullah, along with three other Hezbollah members, the group announced. It was the first time since January that Hezbollah had acknowledged the killing of one of its commanders.

Hezbollah, in a statement Wednesday, said it targeted Israel’s Meron Air Base with rocket and artillery fire in retaliation.

The Israeli military has repeatedly said that it is ready to begin an operation into Lebanon to push back Hezbollah forces from the border at any time.

U.S. officials said they received the Hamas response to the cease-fire proposal from their Egyptian counterparts and will present their own reaction later Wednesday after meetings with Qatari officials, who are helping mediate the deal.

Although the United States has described the cease-fire draft as an Israeli proposal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to distance himself from it, stating repeatedly that Israel will not end the war until Hamas has been destroyed.

Mediators fear that any Hamas amendments to the current deal will be framed by Israel as a rejection, said Aaron David Miller, a longtime U.S. diplomat now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. If Hamas doesn’t reject the deal, “Netanyahu is counting on Hamas to say ‘yes, but’ in a way that is deemed unreasonable,” he said.

Mediators are hoping to delay conversations about more complicated questions of how to end the war in Gaza by getting the two sides to at least agree to the first phase of the deal.

“The logic of the Biden administration is that if the two sides can agree to phase one, the six weeks of quiet will be an incentive to continue,” Miller said.

Almost 3,000 malnourished children in southern Gaza are at risk of dying after recent violence cut them off from treatment, the U.N. children’s agency warned. UNICEF said Tuesday that the numbers represent around three-quarters of the children who were believed to be receiving “life-saving care” in the south before Israel launched its operation in the city of Rafah. The agency added that the deteriorating levels of aid access in the south meant that more children could fall ill with malnutrition. Humanitarian groups have previously warned of the risk of famine in northern Gaza.

A U.N. inquiry said that Israel has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the current war. The report, which the U.N. human rights office said was the first in-depth U.N. investigation of events on and since Oct. 7, also found that Palestinian armed groups carried out war crimes in Israel on Oct. 7. Last month, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor announced he was seeking arrest warrants against senior Israeli and Hamas officials for crimes committed in the current war.

At least ​​37,164 people have been killed and 84,832 injured in Gaza since the war started, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and it says 298 soldiers have been killed since the launch of its military operations in Gaza.

Suzan Haidamous and Mohamad El Chamaa in Beirut and John Hudson in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.