UNIFIL says it cannot attribute responsibility for Majdal Shams incident
Andrea Tenenti, the spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping troops in Lebanon, says the attack that killed 12 people in Syria’s occupied Golan Heights falls outside the force’s operations.
Israel had blamed Hezbollah for the explosion, but the Lebanese group has vehemently denied the allegation.
“UNIFIL is not in the position to attribute the responsibility of the tragic incident in Majdal Shams,” Tenenti said, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA).
Tenenti’s comments come after some media outlets falsely reported that a UNIFIL investigation found Hezbollah to be responsible for the attack.
Israel slams Turkey’s Erdogan over support for Hamas
Foreign Minister Israel Katz has written a scathing post on X in which he accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of “turning Turkey into a dictatorship just because of his support for the murderers and rapists of Hamas, against the stance of the entire free world”.
Katz said that Erdogan is “threatening to invade a democratic country [Israel] with which Turkey has no military conflict, and cutting trade relations, harming Turkish exporters to the tune of $6 billion a year”.
Erdogan has been a vocal critic of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, which many experts and rights groups say constitute a genocide.
.@RTErdogan is turning Turkey into a dictatorship just because of his support for the murderers and rapists of Hamas, against the stance of the entire free world.
He is blocking Instagram, with 57 million users in Turkey, cutting off sports broadcasts because an Israeli athlete… pic.twitter.com/5dpEhELf0C
— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) August 2, 2024
Turkish foreign minister calls Israeli counterpart ‘monument to insolence’
Hakan Fidan hits out at his Israeli counterpart Israel Katz, who has been denouncing Ankara this week after President Erdogan suggested that Turkey might “enter” the conflict to help Palestinians.
“It is a complete sickness that Israel Katz, instead of serving as the minister of foreign affairs, constantly makes our country and our president the subject of his own delusions,” wrote Fidan in a post on X.
“This person, whose presence in the cabinet consists of an obsession with slander and lying, is a monument to the insolence and impudence of the genocidal Netanyahu Government.”
