Middle East crisis live: call for UN inquiry after fresh Israeli attack on peacekeepers in Lebanon

Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez on Friday urged the international community to stop selling weapons to Israel as he condemned attacks by Israel’s armed forces against the United Nations’ peacekeeping force in Lebanon, reports Reuters.

Israeli forces fired at an observation post used by UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon on Friday, injuring two, a UN source said, the third day in a row peacekeepers have reported Israeli fire at their positions as Israel wages war on Hezbollah.

None of the Spanish soldiers who were part of the mission were hit, the Spanish defence ministry said on Friday, according to Reuters.

Spain has deployed 650 peacekeepers in Lebanon and a Spanish general leads the mission.

“Let me at this point criticise and condemn the attacks that the Israeli armed forces are carrying out on the United Nations mission in Lebanon,” Sánchez, whose country has been critical of Israel in the recent escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, said after meeting Pope Francis at the Vatican.

Sánchez said Spain stopped selling weapons to Israel in October 2023 and urged the rest of the world to do the same to prevent further escalation in the region.

“I think it is urgent given what is happening in the Middle East that the international community stops exporting weapons to the Israeli government,” he said.

Israel appeared to target Hezbollah’s security chief in airstrikes on Beirut that killed 22 people, in the deadliest raid on the centre of Lebanon’s capital since the Israel-Hezbollah war began, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The raid came as Israel prepared to observe Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar which begins on Friday, while fighting wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

“The head of Hezbollah’s security apparatus, Wafiq Safa, was targeted,” a source close to the Iran-backed group told AFP, requesting anonymity to discuss the matter.

Safa was close to Hezbollah’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli strike on south Beirut last month.

In 2019, the US Treasury blacklisted Safa, saying he maintained Hezbollah’s ties to financiers and allegedly helped arrange weapons and drugs smuggling.

AFP reports that there has been no official confirmation from either Hezbollah or Israel that Safa was targeted in the attack that Lebanon’s health ministry said killed 22 people.

Tehran will not hesitate to take “stronger defensive actions” if Israel retaliates for last week’s missile attack by Tehran, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has said.

Iran is “fully prepared to take stronger defensive actions, if necessary, in response to any further aggression, and will not hesitate to do so,” Araqchi said in a letter to other foreign ministers, according to a ministry post on X.

Israel has repeatedly said it will respond to Iran’s missile attack at the beginning of this month, launched in retaliation for Israeli strikes in Lebanon and Gaza and the killing of a Hamas leader in Iran.

Araqchi said in his letter that Iran’s missile attack on Israel had been in accordance with its right to self defence under international law and followed much restraint as it sought a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said Israel will hit Iran in a way that will be “lethal, precise and surprising”.

William Christou reports from Beirut for the Guardian

Human Rights Watch (HRW) called for a UN inquiry into Israeli attacks on peacekeepers belonging to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) on Friday, after three separate attacks on Unifil personnel in south Lebanon.

HRW said that Israel’s attacks on UN peacekeepers could be a violation of the laws of war, as peacekeepers, including armed members, are civilians. It further called for the UN to “urgently establish” an international investigation in Lebanon and Israel and that their results are made public.

On Friday morning, a Unifil outpost in south Lebanon came under fire. On Thursday, its headquarters in Naqoura had been repeatedly hit, injuring two peacekeepers after an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower on the base. The Israeli military shot at a Unifil position where peacekeepers were sheltering on Wednesday and an Israeli drone flew up to the entrance of the bunker where they were sheltering, Unifil said.

Unifil said its more than 10,400 peacekeepers would remain in south Lebanon until the situation becomes impossible for them to operate. Peacekeepers are already severely restricted in their movements due to Israeli troop presence in south Lebanon.

The peacekeeping force has been present in south Lebanon since 1978, originally designed to confirm Israel’s withdrawal and ensure that armed groups could not use the area as a launching pad for attacks against Israel. Since 2006, it has been tasked with an observation mission to ensure that armed groups do not operate in the area, in line with UN Resolution 1701 which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Unifil has also had a focus on facilitating humanitarian access and aid to south Lebanon, a mission it continues to this day.

“With over 2,000 people killed and over one million people displaced in Lebanon since mid-September, it is crucial for Unifil to be allowed to fulfil its civilian protection and humanitarian functions”, Lama Fakih, Middle East and north Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said.

US secretary of state Antony Blinken has stated that the US has had an “intense focus” for a year on preventing the spread of conflict in the Middle East, and said his country had been pressuring Israel over the plight of civilians in Gaza, who he said were “caught in a terrible crossfire of Hamas’ instigation.”

Health authorities in Gaza have claimed that over 40,000 people have been killed in the past year by Israel’s ground offensive and aerial bombardment of the territory.

Speaking in Laos, Blinken said there was deep concern in Asia about the plight of people in Gaza, adding:

The intense focus of the US, which has been the case going back a year, and doing just that, (is) preventing these conflicts from spreading. And we’re working on that every day.

We’re working very hard through deterrence and through diplomacy to prevent that from happening. There’s also obviously deep concern that we share about the plight of children, women, and men in Gaza, who for now a year have been caught in a terrible crossfire of Hamas’ instigation.

Blinken supported what he said was Israel’s right to defend itself from attacks from Hezbollah, and its aim to return civilians who had been forced to flee the fighting to their homes, saying “It’s also vitally important that in doing that, [the Israelis] focus on making sure that civilians are protected and, again, are not being caught in a terrible crossfire.”