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President Joe Biden on Tuesday told reporters he has decided on a US response to the deadly drone attack on a US base in Jordan which killed three American soldiers at a US base over the weekend.
Asked whether he’d settled on how to respond to the attack as he departed the White House for a fundraising trip to Florida, Mr Biden replied: “Yes”.
A short time later, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One that the US response to the attack could be “tiered,” meaning it could involve multiple actions rather than just one.
While the US has not specifically attributed the attack to any particular group, the president also told reporters that he holds Iran responsible for the attack because that country’s government is “supplying the weapons to the people who did it,” though he declined to say whether a direct link between Tehran and the attacks has been established by US intelligence.
In the days since the drone attack, some Republicans have been calling for the US to respond by attacking targets within Iran’s borders, while Biden administration officials have been contemplating several different response scenarios, including strikes on Iranian proxies and a strike on an Iranian naval ship in the Persian Gulf.
But Mr Biden said he did not want to see the situation escalate into a broader regional conflict.
“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for,” he said.
Over the weekend, Mr Biden had promised a US response to the deadly incident, which is widely believed to be part of a campaign orchestrated by Tehran to escalate tensions and inflict damage on the US and its allies in the Middle East region.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday that “there’s a responsibility that appropriately needs to be laid at the feet of leaders in Tehran” for the attacks and noted that the Iranian government “clearly” continues to support militant groups that have been attacking US positions, ships, and international commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The drone attack struck a housing trailer on the small, remote US base, known as Tower 22, and killed the three soldiers occupying it while wounding more than 40 others, with eight of the casualties requiring evacuation to a medical facility in Iraq.
The Pentagon on Monday identified the soldiers as Sgt William Jerome Rivers, 46 of Carrollton, Georgia; Specialist Kennedy Ladon Sanders, 24 of Waycross, Georgia; and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23, of Savannah, Georgia. All three were Army reservists assigned to the 718th Engineer Company, 926th Engineer Battalion, 926th Engineer Brigade out of Fort Moore, Georgia.
Iran has denied responsibility for the attack, but Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh on Monday told reporters that it bore “footprints of Kataib Hezbollah” while declining to explicitly credit any group.
“We know that Iran is behind it. And certainly as we’ve said before ... Iran continues to arm and equip these groups to launch these attacks, and we will certainly hold them responsible,” she said.
Israeli commandos disguised as nurses and doctors have raided a West Bank hospital, killing three Hamas terrorists in a lightning-fast, clandestine operation.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed the operation had taken place on Tuesday, after Palestinian media released CCTV video footage showing people dressed as medical workers and Muslim civilians entering a hospital in Jenin, brandishing assault rifles.
The team of IDF and police counter-terrorism commandos entered Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin overnight, killing a man they identified as a member of Hamas, and two other suspects, the Israeli military said.
Mohammed Jalamneh, 27, “had contacts with Hamas headquarters abroad” and was plotting a terrorist attack “in the immediate future”, the IDF said.
Mr Jalamneh was at the hospital to sit with a friend who was convalescing after being wounded in an IDF drone strike on a cemetery in Jenin last year.
The undercover commandos entered the hospital, shot the three men with silenced weapons and promptly left.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted unnamed hospital employees who said the commandos entered the hospital one by one wearing disguises.
The CCTV footage, released by Palestinian media, appears to show the assault team gathering in an entrance foyer in the hospital at the start of the raid.
The first two commandos, one a man wearing a white doctor’s coat and a facemask, the other a woman in a headscarf, pass through the room, stalking across the tiled floor with their shortened rifles raised.
Behind them, another man wearing medical scrubs carries a rifle in one hand and a wheelchair in the other.
In total, around a dozen commandos – all either disguised as medical workers or civilians – can be seen gathering in the hospital.
One man, dressed as a devout Muslim with white prayer cap and long brown robe, carries a suppressed weapon and uses hand signals to direct the commandos to fan out and cover the corridors and doorways.
In the background, several commandos, some wearing hijabs, have their weapons trained on a civilian who has been made to kneel against a wall, with their hands held high.
The civilian’s jacket is removed before their hands are tied behind their back, before the jacket is put over their head as a makeshift hood.
Bags of equipment are brought in and laid down as one of the commandos puts on a balaclava before advancing deeper into the hospital.
After less than a minute, the commandos have moved on and the hallway is empty, save for the hooded civilian.
A surveillance camera documents the moment an Israeli special force disguised as doctors and nurses infiltrate Ibn Sina Hospital
Credit: TWITTER/AJA_PALESTINE
A second video clip released by Palestinian media appeared to show inside the rooms where the three Palestinians were killed.
Two blood-stained chairs are shown, before the camera arrives at a hospital bed, which is also covered in blood. A bullet hole in the pillow suggests the target was killed where he lay.
The Israeli military later released an image showing a handgun with two spare magazines that they said was retrieved during the operation.
Ten other people were reportedly in the same ward where the raid took place but they were unharmed.
The IDF claimed Mr Jalamneh transferred weapons and ammunition to “terrorists” in order to “promote shooting attacks” and reportedly planned a raid attack inspired by the Hamas massacre on Oct 7.
Two other people killed in the raid were identified as Mohammed Ghazawi, affiliated with the Jenin Battalions who allegedly fired at Israeli troops in the area and his brother Basil involved with Islamic Jihad.
A deputy director of the hospital was quoted as saying Mr Ghazawi had been in and out of the hospital since October when he was injured and suffered from partial paralysis of the lower body.
International humanitarian law prohibits parties from using hospital garbs or Red Cross signs for military means.
Base for launching terrorist attacks
The IDF accused the suspects of using the hospital as a base for launching terrorist attacks.
In 1972, commandos disguised themselves as technicians in white overalls and stormed a hijacked aircraft in Tel Aviv, freeing the passengers, killing two terrorists and capturing two others.
But perhaps most famously, a year later, commandos disguised as romantic couples complete with wigs, dresses and handbags, slipped into Beirut on a mission to assassinate the top leaders of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
A young Ehud Barak, who would later become Israel’s prime minister, took part in the raid, which came in the aftermath of the Munich Olympics massacre.
The refugee camp in the city of Jenin in the West Bank has been a focus of IDF clashes with Palestinians for months.
At least 58 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank this year, according to rights groups.
United Nations secretary general António Guterres is to meet with key UNRWA donor nations in New York on Tuesday, according to his spokesperson.
The meeting takes place after 12 staff with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees were accused by Israel of involvement in the 7 October attacks, Agence France-Presse reports.
Several countries, including the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Japan, have announced the suspension of further funding to the agency.
“The secretary-general is personally horrified by the accusations against employees of UNRWA,” Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday.
“But his message to donors – especially those who have suspended their contributions – is to at least guarantee the continuity of UNRWA’s operations, as we have tens of thousands of dedicated staff working throughout the region.”
Guterres has already met with Washington’s representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Monday, and “he will be hosting a meeting here in New York with the major donors for UNRWA [Tuesday] afternoon here,” Dujarric said.
“The secretary-general has also been engaging with the UNRWA leadership and donors to UNRWA, as well as regional leaders, such as King Abdullah of Jordan, whom he spoke to a short while ago, and President (Abdel Fattah) al-Sisi of Egypt.”
UNRWA said it has acted promptly over allegations but that cuts in funding will affect ordinary Palestinians.
In its statement about the raid Israel’s military carried out inside a hospital in Jenin which reportedly killed three Palestinians, the IDF said it had responded to “the cynical use of civilian areas and hospitals as shelters and human shields by terrorist organisations” in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. [See 5.46 GMT]
A series of images released from the hospital show blood-stained scenes, and a chair and a bed with bullet holes. Images have also been released of the corpses of three men in the hospital morgue.
The Wafa news agency identified the three men killed as “siblings Mohammad and Basil Ayman Al-Ghazawi, and Mohammad Walid Jalamna”. It noted that Basil Ayman Al-Ghazawi had been in hospital since mid-October.
It reported:
Sources from inside the hospital explained that about ten members of undercover special forces, disguised in civilian clothes, dressed as doctors and nurses, broke into the hospital, headed to the third floor, and assassinated the three young men using silenced pistols.
The IDF statement also named Mohammed Jalamneh as a target, accusing him of having “contacts with Hamas headquarters abroad” and the al-Ghazawi brothers, who it claimed were involved with the Jenin Battalions and Islamic Jihad.
Associated Press reports that rockets fired by separatist insurgents killed a police officer and wounded a dozen other people overnight in south-western Pakistan. The attack has been claimed by the outlawed Balochistan Liberation Army, which said two of its fighters had been killed.
Yesterday Iran’s foreign minister met his counterpart in Islamabad as well as Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister in a show of rapprochement after the two countries had exchanged harsh words and broken off diplomatic ties in the immediate aftermath of the airstrikes.
The Wafa Palestinian news agency reports that “dozens of Palestinian civilians” have been killed today by Israeli airstrikes, including “intense and fierce airstrikes at the city of Rafah”, which is in the south of the Gaza Strip and is one of the areas Israel’s military has repeatedly told Palestinians to flee to for safety.
Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Rafah for Al Jazeera, said the strike in Rafah caused “a great deal of panic and concern as people believe the military operation is expanding step by step”. He said a house was destroyed and a number of people were reported dead, as “the Israeli military continues bombing, killing and maiming Palestinians across Gaza”.
Wafa reports there have also been airstrikes in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip and in Khan Younis.
On Friday 26 January, the international court of justice in The Hague told Israel it must “take all measures within its power” to desist from killing Palestinians in contravention of the genocide convention.
As the US considers its next steps, Agence France-Presse says that the killing of three US troops is “dragging the US further into a proxy war with Iran that President Joe Biden had hoped to avoid and that he still hopes can be contained.”
Here’s some more of their analysis:
After years of trying to ease tensions with Iran through dialogue, and then months seeking to keep the Israel-Hamas war from escalating, the drone strike by Iranian-backed militants on US forces in Jordan crossed an unstated red line for the Biden administration.
The US has already been hitting another Iranian-backed group, Yemen’s Huthi rebels. The strikes come after warnings failed to dissuade Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, which the insurgents say are acts of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza being bombarded by US ally Israel.
The White House has promised a “very consequential” response to the Jordan attack, which comes at the start of an election year in which Biden’s Republican rivals are going on the offensive and urging direct attacks on Iran.
But the Biden administration has already stated that it does not want war with Iran – where officials have sought to distance themselves from the attack.
“It’s a fork-in-the-road moment,” said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.
Here’s one of the latest images of the US president, Joe Biden, being briefed on the attack on US soldiers in Jordan.
Hamas militants have returned to northern Gaza, where they are mobilising against Israeli forces and rebuilding a system of governance, aid officials, Gaza residents, analysts and Israeli officials say.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Hamas administrators and police maintain firm control of the south, where much of the population is concentrated, though civil order is breaking down in central regions.
The apparent resurgence of Hamas in areas seized and cleared by Israeli troops during the nearly four-month offensive underlines the difficulties Benjamin Netanyahu faces in meeting his pledge to “crush” the militant group.
Eyal Hulata, who until January 2023 was the head of Israel’s national security council, said: “We are hearing more, unfortunately, of the recovery of [an] insurgency in both central and northern Gaza … We’re hearing more and more that Hamas are doing policing in northern Gaza and governing trade, and that is a very bad outcome.”
Read the rest of Jason Burke’s reporting from Jerusalem here:
Let’s look at where events are at since that drone strike on US troops in Jordan.
The United States has vowed to take “all necessary actions” to defend American forces after a drone attack killed three US troops, while Qatar says it hopes US retaliation will not damage regional security or undercut progress towards a new Gaza hostage-release deal.
White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday the United States did not want a wider war with Iran or in the region, “but we got to do what we have to do.”
Meanwhile, US forces may have mistaken an enemy drone for an American one and let it pass unchallenged into the desert base in Jordan, officials said on Monday.
As the enemy drone was flying in at a low altitude, a US drone was returning to the small installation known as Tower 22, according to a preliminary report cited by two officials, who were not authorised to comment and insisted on anonymity, Associated Press (AP) reports.
As a result, there was no effort to shoot down the enemy drone that hit the outpost. Apart from the soldiers killed, the Pentagon said more than 40 troops were wounded in the attack, according to AP.
Asked if the failure to shoot down the enemy drone was “human error,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh responded that US Central Command is still assessing the matter.
International aid agencies have said they are “deeply concerned and outraged” at the “reckless” decision by major donors to cut funding to a UN Palestinian aid agency after Israel accused some of its workers of taking part in Hamas’s 7 October attack.
“We are shocked by the reckless decision to cut a lifeline for an entire population by some of the very countries that had called for aid in Gaza to be stepped up and for humanitarians to be protected while doing their job,” the coalition of 21 agencies, including Oxfam, Save the Children and ActionAid, said in a statement on Monday.
More than 10 western countries including the US, UK and Germany said they would suspend funding to UNRWA, which provides aid to more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, after the agency said it had launched an investigation into 12 staff members who allegedly took part in abductions and killings on 7 October.
The agency has sacked nine of those accused. Two others are missing and one is dead. The UN in New York has also launched a high-level investigation into the alleged acts, which its secretary general, António Guterres, described as “abhorrent”.
In their Monday statement, the aid agencies noted that 2 million civilians, more than half of them children, rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza. “The population faces starvation, looming famine and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s continued indiscriminate bombardment and deliberate deprivation of aid in Gaza,” they said.
Read the rest of Helen’s piece here:
There are reports Israeli forces have stormed Ibn Sina hospital in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday and reportedly killed three Palestinians.
Voice of Palestine radio has reported the raid, according to the Reuters news agency.
A short time later the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted on their Telegram channel saying they had “neutralised” a “Hamas terrorist cell” inside the hospital. The IDF also says that there was a plan to “carry out a terror attack in the immediate period”.
The army statement identified the main target of the overnight raid on Ibn Sina hospital in the city of Jenin as a member of the Islamist militant movement, and the other two as members of Islamic Jihad and a local group of gunmen.
The IDF statement alleges one of the men was planning “a raid attack inspired by the October 7th massacre”.
There was no immediate Palestinian confirmation of their identities, Reuters reports.
The military also declined to say whether the three had been killed according to Reuters, but Voice of Palestine radio reported three Palestinian had been killed at the hospital.
The West Bank has seen a surge of violence since the 7 October attack triggered the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas.
United Nations secretary general António Guterres is to meet with key UNRWA donor nations in New York on Tuesday, according to his spokesperson.
The meeting takes place after 12 staff with the UN agency for Palestinian refugees were accused by Israel of involvement in the 7 October attacks, Agence France-Presse reports.
Several countries, including the United States, France, Britain, Germany and Japan, have announced the suspension of further funding to the agency.
“The secretary-general is personally horrified by the accusations against employees of UNRWA,” Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday.
“But his message to donors – especially those who have suspended their contributions – is to at least guarantee the continuity of UNRWA’s operations, as we have tens of thousands of dedicated staff working throughout the region.”
Guterres has already met with Washington’s representative to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Monday, and “he will be hosting a meeting here in New York with the major donors for UNRWA [Tuesday] afternoon here,” Dujarric said.
“The secretary-general has also been engaging with the UNRWA leadership and donors to UNRWA, as well as regional leaders, such as King Abdullah of Jordan, whom he spoke to a short while ago, and President (Abdel Fattah) al-Sisi of Egypt.”
UNRWA said it has acted promptly over allegations but that cuts in funding will affect ordinary Palestinians.
It’s 7:25am in Gaza and Tel Aviv. Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis with me, Reged Ahmad.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will meet with key donors to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on Tuesday, after 12 of its staff were accused by Israel of involvement in the 7 October attacks.
His spokesperson says the meeting is to take place in New York.
More on that shortly but first, here’s a summary of the main developments so far:
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said the US will respond “decisively” to aggression and hold those responsible for the drone attack on a US military base in Jordan that killed three US troops and wounded dozens more to account. The three US service personnel who were killed in the drone strike have been named by the Pentagon as Sgt William Jerome Rivers, 46, Specialist Kennedy Sanders, 24, and Specialist Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, 23. The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, vowed that the US will take “all necessary actions” to defend its troops, while the Pentagon said it did not believe that Iran is seeking a war with the US, and that Washington doesn’t want a war either.
The enemy drone that was used in the attack on a US base in Jordan may have been confused with an American drone returning to the US installation, according to a report. In describing the drone attack, the two US officials, who were not authorised to comment and insisted on anonymity, said preliminary accounts suggest the enemy drone that struck the installation known as Tower 22 may have been mistaken for an American drone that was in the air at the same time. An Iranian-made drone was used in the deadly attack on Sunday, according to one US official.
Qatar’s prime minister sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al Thani says he hopes US retaliation for a drone attack that killed three US troops in Jordan won’t undercut progress toward a new Israel-Hamas hostage release deal. “I hope that nothing would undermine the efforts that we are doing or jeopardise the process,” he said. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al Thani was speaking in front of a Washington thinktank audience.
Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine reiterated that Israel must halt its offensive and withdraw from Gazabefore any prisoner exchange takes place. Israel remains opposed to a permanent ceasefire and wants to retain a right to recommence hostilities against Hamas – something the Hamas leadership wants ruled out. A senior Hamas official, Taher al-Nunu, said the Palestinian militant group wanted a “complete and comprehensive ceasefire” in Gaza.
The UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has warned it would not be able to continue operations in Gaza and across the region beyond the end of February if funding did not resume. Israel has claimed several UNRWA staff took part in the 7 October attacks or in the aftermath, including a school counsellor who allegedly kidnapped an Israeli woman. A string of western countries including the US and the UK have suspended funding to the agency, which provides aid to more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East. The charity ActionAid described the withdrawal of funding for UNRWA as a “death sentence” for the population of Gaza.
At least 26,637 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza and a further 65,387 injured, according to the latest figures by Gaza’s health ministry on Monday. Two hundred and fifteen Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours, the ministry reported.
The surgical ward at al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza has completely halted operations due to oxygen supplies running out, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said on Monday. Heavy fighting has continued around hospitals in Khan Younis over the past few days, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA said in its latest update on the conflict, noting that only 14 of 36 hospitals in Gaza are now partially functional. Khan Younis’ Nasser hospital, until recently the largest still accepting patients in southern Gaza, is now only “minimally functioning”, OCHA said.
Israel has struck an Iran-linked site south of the Syrian capital, Damascus, killing several people on Monday. Iranian and Syrian official media said the attacks came from the Golan Heights and were attributed to Israel. They have not been regarded as a direct response to the attack on the Tower 22 base on Jordan’s border with Iraq and Syria. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes hit a farm housing members of Lebanon’s Iran-backed militant Hezbollah group and other Iran-backed factions. It said seven people were killed, including four Syrians, one of whom was the bodyguard of a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards.
Israeli troops will “very soon go into action” near the country’s northern border with Lebanon, the country’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has said. The Israeli minister, addressing troops near the Gaza border on Monday, also warned that the war against Hamas “will take months”, and claimed that quarter of Hamas fighters have been killed and at least another quarter have been wounded. The IDF said it had carried out airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. “The targets included Hezbollah’s infrastructure and an observation post located in the southern Lebanese areas of Markaba, Taybeh, and Maroun al-Ras,” the army said in a statement.
Five Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in four different incidents in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the past 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry said on Monday. Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that 378 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October.
The US and the UK announced sanctions against individuals who they said targeted Iranian dissidents and activists for assassination at the direction of the Iranian regime. The UK Foreign Office announced sanctions against seven individuals and one organisation who it said were involved in threats to kill journalists on British soil, and others it said were part of international criminal gangs linked to Iran.
US government employees are planning a “day of fasting for Gaza” this week to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the territory and to denounce Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel.
The US is planning a tiered response that could “come in stages” in retaliation for a drone strike launched by an Iran-backed militia that killed three of its troops in Jordan on Sunday.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last night that the Middle East is experiencing an “incredibly volatile time” as Israel’s war in Gaza continues to fuel violence across the Middle East.
“We’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that,” he told reporters, as he echoed President Biden’s vow to retaliate.
The US response “could be multileveled, come in stages and be sustained over time,” Mr Blinken said.
There have been scant details from US officials on what the plans being drawn up look like. It is expected to be more powerful than previous rounds of retaliatory strikes, according to CNN, while trying to avoid sparking an all-out regional war. Directly striking Iran remains the least likely option, one defence official told the American broadcaster.
Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets.
Khan's former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was also given a 10-year jail sentence as part of the case.
It was alleged that Khan shared the contents of a secret cable sent by the country's ambassador in Washington to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad.
Khan claimed the cable was proof of a conspiracy by the Pakistani military and US government to topple his government in 2022, after he visited Moscow just before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
He also previously said the contents of the cable appeared in the media from other sources.
Washington and the Pakistan military have denied Khan's claims.
Khan's party said they would challenge the decision, by a special court judge at the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, and called it a "sham case".
"We don't accept this illegal decision," Khan's lawyer Naeem Panjutha posted on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, following the sentencing.
It comes as the country prepares to hold elections on 8 February - a vote Khan is barred from running in due to a previous conviction.
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Khan, a former-cricketer-turned-politician, was ousted as prime minister through a no-confidence vote in April 2022.
The 71-year-old, the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, was then jailed in August 2023 on corruption charges - which he claimed were politically motivated.
The conviction ruled him out of the country's general elections next week.
While his jail term was suspended as he challenged the corruption conviction, he has remained in prison awaiting a trial on the state secrets case.
Pakistan has seen violent demonstrations since Khan's arrest last year. Authorities have cracked down on his supporters and party since then.
