Israel has warned it will eliminate the new leader of Hamas, Yahya Shinwar, as the war in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian Islamist movement, now in its eleventh month, threatens to spread across the Middle East.

THE Yahya Sinuar named on Tuesday night a new political leader of Hamas, succeeding Ismail Haniya, whose July 31 assassination in Tehran was blamed on Israel by Iran, which has vowed revenge.

Israeli authorities accuse the top figure of the Palestinian Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip of being among the masterminds of the unprecedented October raid on southern Israel, the trigger for that war.

In the Israeli crosshairs for years, o Yahya Sinuarwhose movement is designated a terrorist organization by Israel, the US and the EU, has not appeared in public since October 7.

“We will multiply the efforts to find him,” the chief of the general staff of the national defense of Israel, General Herchi Halevi, explained yesterday.

While all mediation efforts have so far failed, the war, in which according to the Hamas Health Ministry at least 40,000 lives have been lost in the small besieged Palestinian enclaveis threatened to spread in the Middle East, between Iran and its allies on the one hand and Israel and its own allies, especially the USA, on the other.

Tensions have skyrocketed since the July 30 deaths of Ismail Haniya and Fouad Soukr, a leading figure in Hezbollah’s military wing, in an Israeli bombardment in a southern suburb of Beirut.

Hezbollah and Iran has an ‘obligation to reciprocate’ after the two murders, the leader of the armed Lebanese movement said yesterday Tuesday Hassan Nasrallahdeclaring that there will be retaliation “whatever the consequences”.

During its meeting yesterday in Saudi Arabia, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) ruled that Israel was “fully responsible” for the murder of Ismail Haniya.

Its acting president, Mamadou Tangara (Gambia), condemned the killing, which raised the risk of a “wider conflict” in the Middle East.

Faced with the risk of the war spreading, the international community is looking for ways to appease and restart indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in order to conclude a cease-fire agreement in the Gaza Strip, which will be accompanied by the release of Israeli hostages in the Palestinian enclave in exchange for the release of prisoners Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons.

Diplomatic contacts have multiplied, especially between the countries mediating the indirect negotiations (Qatar, Egypt, USA).

“We believe that we have never come this close” to concluding a cease-fire agreement, the spokesman for the National Security Council of the American presidency, John Kirby, said yesterday.

The head of US diplomacy, Anthony Blinken, whose government is Israel’s main ally at the international level, claimed yesterday that Iran and Israel should avoid military “escalation”.

THE French President Emmanuel Macron also called on Tehran to abandon “the logic of retaliation”stressing that further escalation “is not in anyone’s interest”, while also calling on the Israeli prime minister to “avoid a cycle of retaliation”.

Iranian President Massoud Pezheskian, for his part, demanded that Western countries stop supporting Israel in order to “avoid” a regional armed conflict.

After ten months of war, Israel’s armed forces are continuing their ground and air offensive against Hamas, in power in Gaza since 2007, particularly in areas it asserted it had full control of before fresh fighting broke out.

The Israeli army said yesterday that it was continuing its operations in the central part of the enclave where it “eliminated many terrorists”.

Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7 killed 1,198 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people kidnapped that day, 111 are still being held hostage in Gaza, but 39 are believed to be dead, according to the Israeli military.

In retaliation, Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, in power in the Gaza Strip since 2007, and its wide-ranging operations since then have killed at least 39,677 people, according to the latest figures from the enclave’s health ministry.

These operations have plunged the Palestinian enclave into humanitarian disaster, with the vast majority of its 2.4 million residents displaced.

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced yesterday that it is sending more than one million polio vaccines, as the virus that causes the disease was detected in sewage samples.

The European Union, France and the United Kingdom yesterday condemned statements by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (extreme right), who ruled that “letting the residents of the Gaza Strip die of hunger” would be “justified” and ” moral’ in order to ‘free the hostages’.

Awaiting retaliation announced by Iran and its allies, tensions in Israel have remained high for the past week.

“We are determined to defend ourselves,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday during a visit to the Tel Hasomer military base near Tel Aviv.

THE Egypt announced yesterday that it had asked Egyptian airlines not to use Iranian airspace this morning because of “military training courses” planned in the Islamic Republic.

The concern about the risk of ignition remains high especially in Lebanonwhere yesterday Israeli military jets – once again in recent days – broke the sound barrier over Beirut.

Since October 8, the day after an unprecedented incursion by the Palestinian Islamist movement’s military arm into southern Israeli territory, Hezbollah, a key component of the Iran-adjacent “axis of resistance,” has opened a front against Israel in southern Lebanon, for to “support” Hamas, its ally. Exchanges of fire at the border are practically daily.

An AFP source in the Lebanese security forces spoke of two deaths, a civilian and a member of Hezbollah, in an Israeli bombardment yesterday in Juaiya, in southern Lebanon. In a press release, the Israeli army announced that it had eliminated a “terrorist” in that area.

Hezbollah said it fired rockets at Israel in retaliation. The Israeli army announced for its part that it “destroyed” a facility from where the Lebanese movement launched a drone in the direction of the occupied part of the Golan Heights, which Israel has annexed.