‘I’m afraid we’re going to see more violence and bloodshed’
Nabeel Khoury, a former US diplomat, says Israel continues to act with impunity in the Middle East without even “a rap on the knuckles” from the United States, and this could lead to their enemies acting against international law in a similar fashion.
“All in all, this is very bad news that you could assassinate someone in the middle of another country’s capital, destroying several high-rise residential buildings in the process,” Khoury told Al Jazeera.
“It’s a very bad precedent for the international community indeed,” said the non-resident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC. “The Israelis have massacred close to 50,000 people in Gaza now – most of these, by all international counts, women and children. So, they clearly don’t care about the loss of human life, and the Biden administration has not punished them in any way.
“I’m afraid we’re going to see more violence and bloodshed in Lebanon, in Gaza certainly, and the West Bank as well.”
Palestinians mourn after deadly Israeli attacks on Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp last week
Israel is ‘sprinting in the opposite direction of a ceasefire’
The US has a moral, ethical and strategic responsibility to stop the fighting in the Middle East but Israel also faces international pressure, a professor of international relations at the American University says.
“Beyond that, there’s now the legal obligation with the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court’s decisions. Whether or not the US recognises them, they’re binding,” William Lawrence told Al Jazeera.
Lawrence said the Israeli government “listens to no one except, occasionally, they listen to the United States”.
“But none of this is leading to a ceasefire. This is all leading, sprinting in the opposite direction, of a ceasefire,” he added.
Iran requests UN Security Council meeting
Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, has requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (UNSC) following Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah using bunker-buster bombs.
In a letter to the council’s president, Iravani urged members of the 15-member body to condemn in the strongest terms possible Israel’s “cowardly acts of aggression”. Iravani also “strongly” warned against “any attack on [Iran’s] diplomatic premises and representatives”.
The UNSC met on Wednesday at the request of France, following Israel’s attacks on electronic devices used by Hezbollah and bombardments that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as the “bloodiest day in Lebanon in a generation“.
Russia’s Lavrov suggests killing of Nasrallah aimed at provoking US-Iran war
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters that a lot of people believe Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was aimed at provoking Iran and the US “to unleash a full-blown war in the entire region”.
Killing the Hezbollah leader was “not simply a political assassination. It’s very cynical as an act,” Lavrov told a news conference after addressing the UN General Assembly on Saturday.
“I think – well not even, I think, but a lot of people say – that Israel wants to create the grounds to drag the US directly into this, and so to create these grounds, it is trying to provoke Iran,” Lavrov said.
“The Iran leadership, I think, are behaving extremely responsibly. And this is necessary. This is something that we should take due note of,” he said.
