Middle East latest: Top leaders attend an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general’s funeral

The funeral of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general killed alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah drew the largest crowd of top leaders in the paramilitary organization together Tuesday for the first time since Tehran launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel.

Rumours circulated for weeks over the status of the head of the Guard’s expeditionary arm, Gen. Esmail Qaani, but the Quds Force leader was seen in a black bomber jacket wiping away tears early Tuesday morning at the body repatriation at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport.

Meanwhile, Israeli strikes in the southern Gaza Strip killed at least 15 people overnight, including six children and two women, Palestinian medical officials said Tuesday. In northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging an air and ground campaign in Jabaliya for more than a week, residents said families were still trapped in their homes and shelters.

It’s been more than a year since Hamas-led militants blew holes in Israel’s security fence and stormed in, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities, who do not say how many were fighters but say women and children make up more than half of the fatalities. The war has destroyed large areas of Gaza and displaced about 90 per cent of its population of 2.3 million people.

In solidarity with Hamas, Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has exchanged cross-border fire with Israel almost daily for the past year. Israel escalated its campaign against the group in recent weeks.

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JERUSALEM — A team of American troops supporting a missile defence system in Israel has arrived in the country, the U.S. military said.

A statement from Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder announced the team’s arrival in Israel on Monday. They’ll operate a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence battery there to defend against ballistic missile attacks from Iran. Tehran has launched two missile attacks on Israel as the wars in Gaza and Lebanon rage.

“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Ryder said. “The battery will be fully operational capable in the near future, but for operations security reasons we will not discuss timelines.”

Iran has warned U.S. troops would be in harm’s way if Iran launches another attack on Israel.

GENEVA — The UN health agency says more than 92,000 children aged under 10 in central Gaza received doses of novel oral polio vaccine as a second phase of a vaccination campaign got underway.

World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told reporters Tuesday that the kick-off a day earlier to the second round of polio vaccinations was part of efforts to reach over 179,000 kids in central Gaza — and over 590,000 across the entire strip.

“What we have received from colleagues is that the vaccination went without major issues yesterday,” he told reporters at a regular UN briefing in Geneva. He expressed hopes that a “humanitarian pause” will be respected in north and south Gaza over the next six-to-eight days.

Jasarevic said 92,821 children aged under 10 received the vaccine on Monday, the first day of the new phase of the vaccination campaign.

“No one wants to see any child paralyzed (because of polio),” Jasarevic said. “But there are so many other problems that people in Gaza are facing, and we need sustained access.”

JERUSALEM — Israeli police say one officer was killed and four civilians were wounded in a shooting Tuesday on a highway in central Israel.

Police did not immediately provide the identity of the shooter, but police spokeswoman, Mirit Ben Mayor, said that it was a militant attack.

Police said the attacker approached the highway and shot the officer before firing on civilians, wounding four. The attacker was then shot by a paramedic arriving on the scene, Israel’s rescue services said, without saying whether the attacker was killed.

The shooting occurred on a two-lane highway near the city of Yavne, just south of Tel Aviv.

Ohad Yehezkeli, a spokesperson for nearby Assuta Hospital, said the officer died on the way there and another civilian was being treated for moderate injuries. He said two more wounded people were being transported to the hospital.

Palestinians have carried out dozens of stabbing, shooting and car-ramming attacks against Israelis since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack triggered the war in Gaza.

Israel has ramped up military operations in the occupied West Bank, killing more than 750 Palestinians. Most have been killed during gunbattles with the army or violent protests, but the dead also include civilian bystanders.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A general in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard directly threatened the lives of Israelis during a funeral service in Tehran for a general slain alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The comment from Gen. Ali Fadavi, a deputy commander in chief of the Guard, comes as Iran awaits a threatened retaliation by Israel over its Oct. 1 ballistic missile attack.

“That land is a small land. It’s not even as big as one of Iran’s small provinces,” Fadavi said. “If we will, we can obliterate all the Zionists.”

Iranian officials routinely refer to Israelis as “Zionists.”

The Guard’s leadership attended a funeral service for Gen. Abbas Nilforushan, who was killed alongside Nasrallah in an airstrike in Beirut. Guard leaders and others in Iran’s theocracy have threatened to destroy Israel in the past during the more than four decades since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

JERUSALEM — Israeli police accused Hamas operatives in Turkey of directing a militant attack in August in Tel Aviv in which an explosive went off on a busy street, killing the attacker and wounding a bystander.

There was no immediate comment from Turkey. Relations between the two countries have plunged since the start of the war in Gaza.

Turkey has long provided political support for Hamas, including welcoming its top leaders on visits, but denies involvement in its military activities.

The bomb appeared to have gone off before it was planned to, and it was unclear if the attacker had planned to carry out a suicide bombing or plant the explosives. Both Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group claimed the attack.

Police said Tuesday that they filed indictments against eight suspects. They said the attacker was a militant from Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, who had been directed by an operative in Turkey. They said one of the attack planners had traveled to Turkey several times for explosives training, and that a raid in Nablus uncovered more bombs and funds transferred from Turkey. The police did not provide evidence.

“The findings of this investigation clearly indicate the establishment of Hamas headquarters in Turkey and their extensive efforts abroad to incite violence and carry out bombings in Israel,” the police statement said.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Palestinian first responders say they recovered 11 bodies, nearly all women and children, from a home destroyed in an airstrike in northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging an air and ground operation for over a week.

The Gaza Health Ministry’s ambulance service said the dead recovered Tuesday were all from the same family and included seven women and three children.

Fares Abu Hamza, head of the emergency service, said ambulances were only able to reach the area in the Jabaliya refugee camp around 12 hours after the airstrike late Monday. He said funeral prayers for the dead, which included a medic killed in Jabaliya, were held Tuesday in the courtyard of the Kamal Adwan Hospital.

First responders from the Civil Defence said its teams evacuated three families Tuesday who were stuck inside their homes in Jabaliya for several days because of heavy fighting.

Since the start of the war, the Israeli military has carried out several large operations in Jabaliya — a densely populated urban refugee camp dating back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — only to return months later after saying militants had regrouped there. Israel launched a large operation there on Oct. 6.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The funeral of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general killed alongside Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah drew the largest crowd of top leaders in the paramilitary organization together Tuesday for the first time since Tehran launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel.

The Guard’s leadership hasn’t been as visible in the two weeks since Iran’s Oct. 1 attack on Israel. The Guard is the main power behind Iran’s theocracy and oversees its arsenal of ballistic missiles — which would be crucial in any future attack on Israel.

At the funeral in Tehran for Gen. Abbas Nilforushan, the Guard’s chief commander, Gen. Hossein Salami, attended alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and the head of the country’s judiciary. Other Guard generals also attended, including Gen. Esmail Qaani of the Guard’s expeditionary Quds Force, about whom rumours had circulated for days regarding his status after the strike that killed Nasrallah.

At least two prominent Guard generals were not on hand: Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of Guard’s aerospace division that oversees its missile program, and Gen. Ali Reza Tangsiri, commander of the Guard’s navy, did not attend.

Iran offered no explanation for their absence, though Israel has threatened to carry out a serious retaliatory strike against Iran.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli strikes in the southern Gaza Strip killed at least 15 people overnight, including six children and two women, Palestinian medical officials said Tuesday.

A strike early Tuesday hit a house in the southern town of Beni Suhaila, killing at least 10 people from one extended family, according to Nasser Hospital in nearby Khan Younis. The dead include three children and one woman, according to hospital records. An Associated Press camera operator at the hospital counted the bodies.

In the nearby town of Fakhari, a strike hit a house early Tuesday, killing five people, including three children and a woman, according to the European Hospital, where the casualties were taken.

The Israeli military rarely comments on individual strikes. It says it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas, accusing the militants of sheltering in civilian areas.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — In northern Gaza, where Israel has been waging an air and ground campaign in Jabaliya for more than a week, residents said families were still trapped in their homes and shelters Tuesday.

Adel al-Deqes said his relatives tried to move to another place in Jabaliya in the morning, but the military shelled them.

“We don’t know who died and who is still alive,” he said.

Ahmed Awda, another Jabaliya resident, said they heard “constant bombing and gunfire” overnight and Tuesday morning. He said the military destroyed many buildings in the eastern and northern parts of the camp, which dates back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.

“They bombed many buildings; some of them empty buildings,” he said.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The head of the expeditionary arm of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has appeared in television footage aired Tuesday by Iranian state television.

Rumours circulated for weeks over Gen. Esmail Qaani’s status in the time since an Israeli airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut in late September. But Qaani, the head of the Quds Force, was seen in a black bomber jacket, wiping away tears at an event early Tuesday morning at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport.

While Iranian state television did not acknowledge the rumours, it made a point to film Qaani for over a minute and later share the footage from the airport ceremony online.

Qaani was on hand for the repatriation to Iran of the body of Revolutionary Guard Gen. Abbas Nilforushan, 58, who was killed in the airstrike.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Australia’s government has imposed targeted financial sanctions and travel bans on five Iranians contributing to the country’s missile defence program, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Tuesday.

Iran’s launch of at least 180 ballistic missiles against Israel on Oct. 1 was “a dangerous escalation that increased the risk of a wider regional war,” Wong said in a statement.

The fresh sanctions target two directors and a senior official in Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, the director of the Shahid Bagheri Industrial Group, and the commercial director of the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group.

The decision brings to 200 the number of Iran-linked individuals and entities now sanctioned by Australia.

“Australia will continue to hold Iran to account for its reckless and destabilizing actions,” Wong said.