Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said on Thursday that Israel had turned ‘rogue’ state with its ‘assassination’ of the Hamas political leader and needed to be stopped.
He said the killing of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s lead negotiator in efforts for a truce and hostage release deal for Gaza, was a clear sign that Israel had decided to undermine the US-backed talks.Â
‘Yesterday, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh. He was the one who was negotiating the exchange deal. So how on earth is a country that wants to conclude a deal killing the main interlocutor in those negotiations?’ Safadi told a news conference.Â
‘So when Netanyahu decided and sent his missiles to assassinate Haniyeh in Iran in violation of the sovereignty of another country and bringing escalation to a very high level, is that somebody who wants the deal to work?
‘And all the work that has been done by Egypt, Qatar, and the US to bring a deal that would have brought a ceasefire, that would have released the hostages, that would have released prisoners, Israel decided to undermine all that’.
Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s death, but both Iran and Hamas said it was the result of an Israeli air strike in Tehran before dawn on Wednesday.
Safadi demanded action by the international community to rein Israel in.
‘The Security Council must not allow a state that has turned rogue to impose more wars and more destruction on the region.’
Earlier on the day, the Israeli military announced that Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif had been killed in a strike it carried out last month in Gaza’s southern area of Khan Yunis.
The military’s confirmation it had killed Deif comes a day after the killing of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, which was announced by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hamas.
‘The IDF (Israeli army) announces that on July 13th, 2024, IDF fighter jets struck in the area of Khan Yunis, and following an intelligence assessment, it can be confirmed that Mohammed Deif was eliminated in the strike,’ a military statement said.
‘Deif initiated, planned, and executed the October 7th massacre,’ the military said of the Hamas attack on southern Israel that resulted in the death of 1,197 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza said at the time of the July 13 strike that it killed more than 90 people but Hamas denied Deif was among them.
The suspected 2,000-pound bomb (900 kilogrammes0 around the house where Deif was said to have taken refuge with one of his deputies had left a giant crater.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned Thursday that the group was bound to respond to Israel’s killing of its top military commander, saying his death and that of the Hamas leader ‘crossed’ red lines.
‘The enemy, and those who are behind the enemy, must await our inevitable response,’ he said in a speech broadcast at the funeral of Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr.
‘You do not know what red lines you crossed,’ he said, addressing Israel after separate strikes in Beirut and Tehran killed Shukr and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh.Â
Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s killing, but it announced that it had ‘eliminated’ Shukr, describing him as Hezbollah’s ‘most senior military commander’ and Nasrallah’s ‘right-hand man’.
Shukr, who used the nom de guerre Hajj Mohsen, led operations in south Lebanon, where the group says it has opened a ‘support front’, exchanging near-daily fire with Israel since war erupted in Gaza in October.
‘We, on all the support fronts, have entered a new phase,’ Nasrallah said, referring to Hezbollah and other Iran-backed groups that have targeted Israel in support of Hamas after the Palestinian group launched an October 7 attack on Israel, triggering the war.
Meanwhile, Hamas called for a ‘day of furious rage’ for Friday, coinciding with the burial of its leader Ismail Haniyeh in Qatar.
Hamas in a statement on Thursday encouraged an outpouring of public anger following Haniyeh’s killing in Tehran in an attack blamed on Israel, as well as to protest the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
‘Let roaring anger marches start from every mosque’ following Friday prayers, the group said.
Haniyeh, who resided in exile in Qatar with other members of Hamas’s political leadership, is to be buried in the Gulf state today after a public funeral held Thursday in the Iranian capital.
Haniyeh and a bodyguard were killed Wednesday in a pre-dawn strike on their accommodation in Tehran, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said, in an attack that has stoked fears of a wider regional conflict.
