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Leading Hamas member killed in airstrike, Israeli military says

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Following an exchange of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, it was until recently believed that 132 of them were still being held in Gaza. However, it is now assumed that many of them are no longer alive.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said on Sunday it had opened a new border crossing for humanitarian aid into Gaza in coordination with the United States.

The crossing, called Western Erez, was opened in northern Gaza to transfer humanitarian aid, the military said in a statement.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron. Photo: Getty Images / TNS
Also on Sunday, of Great Britain Foreign Secretary David Cameron said stopping arms exports to Israel was “not a wise course of action” and would only strengthen Hamas.
Asked whether the UK would follow the US and threaten to cut off supplies of offensive weapons to Israel if Israel carried out an attack on the southern Gaza town of Rafah, Cameron said the two countries were not comparable Great Britain, in contrast to the USA, delivers very little quantity Israel Weapons.
“The UK supplies less than 1 percent of Israel’s weapons and is not a state supplier,” Cameron said BBC on Sunday. “We have a licensing system and these licenses can be closed if it is determined that there is a serious risk of a serious international human rights violation.”
American President Joe Biden has said his government will stop supplying arms and artillery to Israel if its forces launch a full-scale attack on Rafah, the last major Hamas stronghold in Gaza.

The opposition British Labor Party and human rights groups argue that the United Kingdom should take a similar position and stop the sale of British-made weapons or components as part of a Rafah offensive.

Israeli soldiers sit in a tank near the Israel-Gaza border. The Israeli military said on Sunday that a senior Hamas member was killed in an airstrike in Gaza. Photo: Reuters

The US government said on Friday that Israel’s use of US-supplied weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law. But it added that wartime conditions prevented U.S. officials from determining with certainty about certain airstrikes.

Cameron also said that deploying British troops to Gaza as part of the international aid effort would be “a risk we should not take.”

His comments followed reports that British authorities are considering deploying troops to land humanitarian aid from a makeshift pier being built by the US military.

Cameron said his government’s view was that “wearing British boots on the beach was actually not a good move”. He said the aid delivery would most likely be carried out by a contractor.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that Israel lacks a “credible plan” to protect the roughly 1.4 million Palestinian civilians in Rafah and warned that an Israeli strike could trigger an uprising since not all Hamas fighters are in the city would be killed in the south of the Gaza Strip.

“Israel may be on its way to inheriting an insurgency with many armed Hamas fighters left, or it may be leaving a vacuum filled with chaos, filled with anarchy and likely filled again with Hamas,” Blinken said on NBC Meet the press Program.

Hamas fighters, he said, are already returning to areas in the northern Gaza Strip that Israel has said it has evacuated.

We have the same goals as Israel. We want to ensure that Hamas cannot rule Gaza again

Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State

Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah has helped fuel the deepest tensions in relations between Israel and its most important ally in generations.

NBC and CBS News aired interviews with Blinken discussing U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to suspend a bomb shipment to Israel over fears of massive civilian casualties in Rafah and a State Department report that the use of U.S.-supplied weapons by The focus was on Israel possibly violating international law.

The report, which had nothing to do with the bomb delivery, found no specific violations that justified withholding U.S. military aid. The chaos of war prevented individual suspected violations from being examined.

Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure and tunnels “makes it very difficult, especially in the middle of war, to determine” what happened in certain cases, Blinken said, defending the report criticized by some Democrats and human rights groups.

Blinken defended the pause in the delivery of 3,500 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs, saying Israel lacked a “credible plan” to protect civilians sheltering in Rafah.

He told CBS that the shipment was the only U.S. arms package withheld.

But that could change, he said, if Israel were to launch a full-scale attack on Rafah, which Israel says it plans to invade to root out entrenched Hamas fighters.

Internally displaced Palestinians leave Rafah with their belongings after the Israeli army issued an evacuation order. Photo: EPA-EFE

If Israel “launches this major military operation in Rafah, then there are certain systems that we will not support and deliver for that operation,” Blinken said.

Israel needs “a clear, credible plan to protect civilians that we have not yet seen,” he said.

Israel has also not developed a postwar plan for Gaza’s security, administration and reconstruction, Blinken said, adding on CBS that the United States is working with Arab governments and others on such a plan.

“We have the same goals as Israel,” he said. “We want to ensure that Hamas cannot rule Gaza again.”

Additional reporting by Associated Press, Reuters

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