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Israel says it carried out ground raid into Syria, seizing a Syrian citizen connected to Iran
The Israeli military said Sunday it has carried out a ground raid into Syria, seizing a Syrian citizen involved in Iranian networks. It was the first time in the current war that Israel announced its troops operated in Syrian territory.
Israel has carried out airstrikes in Syria multiple times over the past year, targeting members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and officials from Iran, the close ally of both Hezbollah and Syria. But it has not previously made public any ground forays into Syria.
The Israeli military said the seizure was part of a special operation “that took place in recent months,” though it did not say exactly when it occurred. Syria did not immediately confirm the announcement, but a pro-government Syrian radio station, Sham FM, reported Sunday that Israeli forces carried out a “kidnapping operation” over the summer targeting a man in the south of the country.
Israel has waged an escalating campaign of bombardment in Lebanon for the past six weeks, as well as a ground invasion along the countries’ shared border, vowing to cripple Hezbollah. On Saturday, an Israeli military official said naval forces carried out a raid in a northern Lebanese town, seizing a man they called a senior Hezbollah operative.
The army identified the man as Ali Soleiman al-Assi, saying he lives in the southern Syrian region of Saida. It said the man had been under military surveillance for many months and was involved in Iranian initiatives targeting areas of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights near the border with Syria.
Body camera video of the raid released by the army showed soldiers seizing a man in a white tank top inside a building. The man was brought to Israel for interrogation, the military said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the border with Lebanon on Sunday, saying his focus was trying to keep Hezbollah from rearming itself through the “oxygen lifeline” of Iranian weapons transferred to Lebanon via Syria. Israel says its campaign in Lebanon aims to push Hezbollah away from the border and put an end to more than a year of fire by the group into northern Israel.
Israel’s strikes in Lebanon have killed more than 2,500 people over the past year. In Israel, 69 people have been killed by Hezbollah projectiles.
On the U.S. presidential campaign trail this weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged progressives and members of the state’s significant population of Arab Americans who are angry at the Biden administration for its continuation of the U.S. alliance with Israel as the Netanyahu government presses its war against Hamas in Gaza.
“I have been very clear that the level of death of innocent Palestinians is unconscionable,” Harris told reporters.
In East Lansing, Michigan, she addressed the issue soon after beginning her remarks. “As president I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, to bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to freedom, dignity and self-determination,” she said.
Some students in East Lansing voiced their opposition Sunday with audible calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war. At least one attendee was escorted out after the cease-fire calls.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces continued an offensive in the northern Gaza Strip, where the military has said it is battling Hamas fighters who regrouped there.
Shell fire hit Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, injuring patients, including children, hospital director Hossam Abu Safiya said in a statement to the media. He said the shells hit the hospital’s nursery, dormitory and water tanks just after a delegation from the World Health Organization ended a visit.
Kamal Adwan and two other nearby hospitals have been hit by Israel several times during the fighting. Earlier this month, Israeli troops stormed Kamal Adwan, detaining a large number of people, including much of the staff, Abu Safiya said at the time of the raid. The military said those detained included members of Hamas, without providing evidence, and said weapons were found in the facility.
But the Israel Defense Forces in a statement denied striking Kamal Adwan on Sunday, blaming “an explosive device planted by the terrorist organizations in Gaza” for the attack.
“Attacks on civilians, including humanitarian workers, and what remains of Gaza’s civilian facilities and infrastructure must stop,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement Saturday. “The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza, especially children, is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and the ongoing bombardments.”
In southern Gaza, an Israeli strike hit a group of people gathered outside in an eastern district of Khan Younis, killing at least eight Palestinians, including four children and a woman, the territory’s Health Ministry’s emergency services said. The city’s Nasser Hospital, which received most of the bodies, confirmed the figures.
Palestinian officials said an Israeli drone strike on Saturday hit a clinic in northern Gaza where children were being vaccinated for polio, wounding six people including four children. The Israeli military denied responsibility.
Dr. Munir al-Boursh, director general of the Gaza Health Ministry, told The Associated Press that a quadcopter struck the Sheikh Radwan clinic in Gaza City early Saturday afternoon, just a few minutes after a United Nations delegation left the facility.
UNICEF and WHO, which are jointly carrying out the polio vaccination campaign, expressed concern over the reported strike. Rosalia Bollen, a spokesperson for UNICEF, said the strike occurred when a “humanitarian pause” agreed to by Israel to allow vaccinations was in effect.
Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesperson, said that “contrary to the claims, an initial review determined that the (Israeli military) did not strike in the area at the specified time.”
It was not possible to resolve the conflicting accounts. Israeli forces have repeatedly raided hospitals in Gaza over the course of the war, saying Hamas uses them for militant purposes, allegations denied by Palestinian health officials. Hamas fighters are also operating in the north, battling Israeli forces.
Northern Gaza has been encircled by Israeli forces and largely isolated for the past year. Israel has been carrying out another offensive there in recent weeks that has killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands.
A scaled-down campaign to administer a second dose of the polio vaccine began Saturday in parts of northern Gaza. It had been postponed from Oct. 23 due to lack of access, Israeli bombings and mass evacuation orders, and the lack of assurances for humanitarian pauses, a U.N. statement said.
Administration of the first doses was carried out in September across the Gaza Strip, including the north.
At least 100,000 people have been forced to evacuate from areas of north Gaza toward Gaza City in the past few weeks, but around 15,000 children under the age of 10 remain in northern towns, including Jabaliya, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, which are inaccessible, according to the U.N.
The final phase of the polio vaccination campaign had aimed to reach an estimated 119,000 children in the north with a second dose of the oral polio vaccine, the agencies said, but “achieving this target is now unlikely due to access constraints.”
They say 90% of children in every community must be vaccinated to prevent the spread of the disease.
The campaign was launched after the first polio case was reported in Gaza in 25 years — a 10-month-old boy, now paralyzed in the leg. The World Health Organization said the presence of a paralysis case indicates there could be hundreds more who have been infected but aren’t showing symptoms.
The war began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting another 250. Israel’s offensive has killed over 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, who do not say how many were combatants but say more than half were women and children.
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Cargo ship launched to space station with supplies, science gear and holiday treats for crew
SpaceX launched an unpiloted Dragon cargo ship Monday evening, an election eve flight to deliver three tons of crew supplies, science gear and other equipment to the International Space Station, including an unusual wooden satellite, a solar wind monitor and holiday fare for the lab’s crew.
The Dragon’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from historic launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 9:29 p.m. EST, lighting up the night sky for miles around as it climbed away atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust.
After boosting the rocket out of the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage, making its fifth flight, peeled away, reversed course and headed back to an on-target landing at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station while the second stage continued the climb to space.
The landing marked SpaceX’s 57th successful booster recovery at the Florida Space Force station and its 363rd overall, including California flights and droneship landings.
Just under 10 minutes after liftoff, the vacuum-optimized engine powering the Falcon 9’s second stage shut down and one minute later, the Dragon was released to fly on its own. If all goes well, it will catch up with the space station Tuesday morning and move in for docking at the lab’s forward port at 10:15 a.m.
One of the first items on the agenda is a test Friday to determine the Cargo Dragon’s ability to boost the space station’s orbit slightly using its aft-facing thrusters. The ISS is routinely re-boosted by Russian Progress freighters and Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo ships, but Friday’s test will be a first for SpaceX.
The California rocket builder is under contract to NASA to build a powerful space tug of sorts that can be used to safely drive the ISS back into the atmosphere when the lab complex is retired in the 2030 timeframe. The vehicle is needed to make sure the station breaks up over a stretch of ocean well away from populated areas and shipping lanes.
During the test Friday, the Cargo Dragon’s aft thrusters will fire for about 12 minutes.
“The data that we’re going to collect from this reboost and attitude control demonstration will be very helpful, informing SpaceX analyses on how the system performs,” said Jared Metter, SpaceX director of flight reliability. “This data is going to lead to future capabilities, namely the US de-orbit vehicle.”
Reboost aside, the Cargo Dragon is loaded with slightly more than 6,000 pounds of equipment and supplies, including 2,022 pounds of science gear, 2,119 pounds of crew clothing, food and other supplies, 377 pounds of spacewalk equipment, 525 pounds of space station hardware and 44 pounds of computer equipment.
One of the more unusual payloads: Lignosat, a small wooden satellite using a framework of magnolia panels built by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan and the Tokyo-based logging company Sumitomo.
“While some of you might think that wood in space seems a little counterintuitive, researchers hope that this investigation demonstrates that a wooden satellite can be more sustainable and less polluting for the environment than conventional satellites,” said Meghan Everett, the ISS deputy project scientist.
“The main objective here is to determine whether wood can be used in space, and to do this, researchers will measure the temperature and strain of the wooden structure and see how it might change in the vacuum environment of space with atomic oxygen and radiation conditions as well.”
As with all station-bound Dragon cargo ships, the crew supplies include fresh food and special treats for holiday meals.
Bill Spetch, ISS operations and integration manager, said the “food kit” includes “citrus, apples, sweet onions, blueberries, radishes, etc,” along with lobster, crab and quail for holiday meals. A variety of cheeses is on board as well as fresh coffee and personal items requested by each crew member.
Mounted in the Dragon’s unpressurized trunk section is the Coronal Diagnostic Experiment, or CODEX, an instrument that will be mounted outside the space station to learn more about how charged particles in the solar wind are heated to millions of degrees and accelerated to enormous velocities, affecting Earth’s space environment and the rest of the solar system.
Inside the station, the astronauts will have a variety of new experiments and instruments to operate and monitor, including one called ARTEMOSS that will examine how Antarctic moss tolerates the space radiation and microgravity environment to learn more about how plants might be used in future life support systems.
The European Space Agency is sending up a space exposure experiment to learn more about how high-tech materials respond to prolonged exposure to the weightless environment and another experiment to study how organic samples degrade when exposed to unfiltered ultraviolet light from the sun.
And in an experiment that could be particularly useful to future astronauts, a small device known as Nanolab Astrobeat, provided by the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, will test cold welding technology that could prove useful for repairing leaks or other damage from inside a spacecraft.
The Cargo Dragon is expected to remain docked at the space station for about a month before it returns to Earth with station components needing refurbishment, trash and other no-longer-needed items.