Israeli commander in Qatar to seek mediation over Gaza escalation: Report
The chief of the Israeli military’s Southern Command Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi has visited Qatar amid heightened tensions in the Gaza Strip, a report says.
Halevi flew to Doha on Monday along with other officials from the Israeli military and Israel's spy agencies Shin Bet and Mossad to ask Hamas leaders residing there to prevent a military escalation in Gaza, the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat reported.
“The delegation worked on negotiating an agreement or a ceasefire accepted by Hamas leaders residing in the Qatari capital, mainly Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri,” it quoted intelligence sources in Tel Aviv as saying.
While Egypt has been seeking to mediate a ceasefire, the report said the Israeli military wants to see Doha play a larger role in mediating.
According to the report, the sources said Hamas leaders “take Israeli threats to assassinate party figures seriously”.
The Palestinian resistance movement of Hamas on Friday warned that Israel will “pay the price” for any aggression against the coastal enclave.
Qatar is one of the largest donors to the Gaza Strip, which has been under a crippling Israeli siege since June 2007, which has caused a decline in living standards as well as unprecedented unemployment and poverty.
Israel has also launched three major wars against the enclave since 2008, killing thousands of Gazans each time and shattering the impoverished territory’s already poor infrastructure.
For the past weeks, the Israeli war machine has been pounding different areas of Gaza either by its warplanes or through artillery fire, claiming that the attacks were mainly in response to incendiary balloons sent by Gazans to cause bush fire in the southern parts of the occupied territories.
Flying fiery kites and balloons has become a new mode of protest by Gazans since March 2018, when the Tel Aviv regime began a crackdown on anti-occupation demonstrations near the fence separating Gaza from the Israeli-occupied territories, killing and injuring many people.
The Israeli military has already boosted the number of Iron Dome batteries in the southern parts of the occupied territories in response to the uptick in tensions.
Early on Monday morning, Israel conducted fresh artillery and aerial attacks in Gaza.
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