ISRAEL HAS KILLED a senior commander from Fatah’s armed wing in a strike in Lebanon, leading to accusations from the Palestinian party that Israel is trying to “ignite a regional war”.

Fatah, the Palestinian party based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said Khalil Maqdah was killed in a strike near the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

The Israeli military said it targeted the brother of Mounir Maqdah, who heads the Lebanese branch of Fatah’s armed wing. It accused them both of “directing attacks and smuggling weapons” into the West Bank and collaborating with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Fatah, which is headed by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and has long been a rival to the Gaza Strip’s Hamas, recently signed a declaration of “national unity” with Hamas and other smaller Palestinian groups in Beijing.

Fatah is the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has limited governing power in the West Bank, often collaborating with the Israeli occupation forces. 

Western countries, including Ireland, have said since the beginning of the war on Gaza that the PA should be given control of the territory once the current conflict has ended. 

In the last 10 months, there has been a dramatic increase in Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. More than 600 people have been killed by settlers and the Israeli military during that period. 

Maqdah’s killing marks the first such attack on a senior Fatah member in the more than 10 months of cross-border clashes between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah that were sparked by the Hamas-led attack on 7 October.

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 war in Gaza.

Blinken appealed to Hamas to urgently accept a US-backed “bridging” 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 since October.

“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.

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 in Rafah that Israeli forces seized from Hamas.

Netanyahu has also repeatedly said he will only agree to a “ceasefire” when Hamas has been completely destroyed, an approach his own Defence Minister has criticised. 

Israeli attacks in Lebanon

As tensions continue to escalate, Lebanon’s health ministry said earlier today that Israeli strikes in the country’s east killed one person and wounded 20, hours after four were killed in the south.

Cross-border skirmishes have taken place almost daily between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, but fears of a greater crisis have deepened s ince Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated while on a visit to Tehran at the end of July.

Iran has vowed retaliation, blaming Israel for the assassination, but has held off so far, with the United States sending additional warships into the region.

With reporting from AFP