Photo: Collected
Israel killed a senior militant from Fatah's armed wing Wednesday in a strike on Lebanon, leading to
accusations from the Palestinian movement that Israel is trying to "ignite aregional war".
Fatah, the Palestinian movement based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said Khalil Maqdah was killed in a strike near the southern Lebanese city ofSidon.
The Israeli military said it targeted the brother of Mounir Maqdah, who headsthe Lebanese branch of Fatah's armed wing. It accused them both of "directing attacks and smuggling weapons" to the West Bank and collaborating with Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
In response, the slain militant's Fatah movement, which is headed by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and rivals the Gaza Strip's Islamist rulers Hamas, accused Israel of bidding to trigger a wider regional war.
Maqdah's killing marks the first such attack on a senior Fatah member in more than 10 months of cross-border clashes between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah movement following the Gaza war.
The "assassination of a Fatah official is further proof that Israel wants to ignite a full-scale war in the region," Tawfiq Tirawy, a member of Fatah's central committee, told AFP in Ramallah.
It came only hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken left empty-handed after a tour of the Middle East aimed at reaching a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Blinken appealed to Hamas to urgently accept a US-backed truce proposal, while also entering into a public spat with Israel over its future presence in the besieged Palestinian territory.
"Time is of the essence," Blinken said before flying out of Doha after stops in Qatar, Egypt and Israel on his ninth regional tour seeking to halt the Gaza war.
"This needs to get done, and it needs to get done in the days ahead, and we will do everything possible to get it across the finish line," he said of the truce proposal.
The United States has presented ideas to bridge gaps and, through Qatar and Egypt, pressed Hamas to return to talks this week in Cairo.
But a day after Blinken said US ally Israel was on board, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted by Israeli media as disagreeing on a key sticking point.
Netanyahu insisted Israel maintain control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the border between Gaza and Egypt that Israeli forces seized from Hamas, whom Israel says relies on secret tunnels to bring in weapons.
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