Macron calls for a stop to arms sales to Israel

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Lerato Khumalo

France’s president calls for a stop to certain arms deliveries to Israel. After Iran’s attack, Israel announced retaliation. All developments in the news blog.

4:46 p.m.: Contact with Hezbollah’s possible new leader, Hashem Safieddin, has been lost since Israeli air strikes on Beirut on Friday. This is reported by the terrorist militia itself. Sadieddin was most recently seen as the successor to Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli air strike.

3:31 p.m.: French President Emmanuel Macron is in favor of stopping the supply of weapons to Israel that are used in the Gaza Strip. Today, the priority is to return to a “political solution” and to end arms deliveries “for the fighting in the Gaza Strip,” Macron explains on France Inter radio station. “France doesn’t deliver,” he further emphasizes.

2:09 p.m.: The Israeli army is preparing its response to the Iranian missile attack on Israel on Tuesday evening, according to a military official. “The IDF (Israeli Army) is preparing a response to the unprecedented and unlawful Iranian attack on Israeli civilians and Israel,” a military official, who requested anonymity, said on Saturday. He does not provide any further details about the type or timing of the planned response.

The left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, citing the army, that the reaction will be “significant.” The army is “preparing for a significant attack in Iran following a missile attack from Tehran this week,” the newspaper reports.

The army does not rule out “the possibility that Iran will fire rockets into Israeli territory again after the Israeli attack,” the newspaper continued.

2:21 p.m.: According to the army, Israeli ground troops have destroyed further tunnels belonging to the Hezbollah terrorist organization and weapons depots in southern Lebanon. These targets are embedded in mountainous, densely built-up areas with explosive traps. Weapons and ammunition are often hidden in residential buildings.

During underground combat operations, tunnels that Hezbollah terrorists used to approach the border with Israel were blown up. The information cannot be independently verified.

12:56 p.m: Even the US government is apparently unclear about how its close ally Israel will respond to Tuesday’s Iranian missile attack. The Israeli government has not ruled out an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in Washington, CNN reported, citing an official in the US State Department. He also could not say whether Israel would strike on the anniversary of the Hamas attack on October 7th. “We hope Israel’s response will be not only a strong one, but also a wise one,” CNN quoted the anonymous source as saying. “But we don’t have a guarantee for that.”

The Islamist regime in Tehran has been striving for a nuclear bomb for decades. The country is now said to have enriched enough uranium to produce a nuclear bomb within a few months. Israel wants to prevent this at all costs; the mullahs’ regime has declared the destruction of Israel as its state goal. However, Israel’s military capabilities are unlikely to be sufficient to destroy or significantly weaken Iran’s nuclear program without massive support from the US Army.

7:35 a.m: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Arakchi arrived in the Syrian capital Damascus. A spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Arakchi wanted to hold talks there about the situation in the region, among other things. The day before, the minister was in Beirut for talks.