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A source close to the ministry cited a senior government official as saying it had stopped work on approving export licences for arms to Israel due to legal and political pressure from legal cases arguing that such exports from Germany breached humanitarian law. The Economy Ministry has not responded to requests for comment. However, the German government did issue a statement after the Reuters story was published.

"There is no German arms export boycott against Israel," government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit said.

In its defence of two cases, one before the International Court of Justice and one in Berlin brought by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the government has said no weapons of war have been exported under any licence issued since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, apart from spares for long-term contracts, the source added.

This week’s attacks were not, as Israel’s defenders claimed, “surgical” or a “precisely targeted anti-terrorist operation”. Israel and Hezbollah are sworn enemies. The current round of fighting has seen tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Israel-Lebanon border because of the Shia militant group’s rocket and artillery attacks.

However, the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities. The plan appeared to produce what lawyers might call “excessive incidental civilian harm”. Both these arguments have been levelled at Russia to claim Moscow was committing war crimes in Ukraine. It’s hard to say why the same reasoning is not applied to Israel – apart from that it is a western ally.

Such disproportionate attacks, which seem illegal, are not only unprecedented but may also become normalised. If that is the case, the door is opened for other states to lethally test the laws of war. The US should step in and restrain its friend, but Joe Biden shows no sign of intervening to stop the bloodshed. The road to peace runs through Gaza, but Mr Biden’s ceasefire plan – and the release of hostages – has not found favour with either Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Hamas.

Two beeps and a pause was the only warning Yusuf got. He turned around to face the noise, thinking it was one of his medical instruments, but instead was met with an explosion, throwing shrapnel into his leg. His patient fared much worse.

“The patient lost consciousness; he started bleeding. His face, neck and lips were burned. He had knife-like cuts, as if he was hit by a rocket,” Yusuf, a doctor from Beirut speaking under a pseudonym, said while waiting for an injured friend outside a Beirut hospital. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a small wound, the remnants of his patient’s exploded pager.

The complex operation – probably carried out by Israeli intelligence – on Tuesday that targeted the pagers used by members of Hezbollah left at least 2,800 injured and 12 dead, including two children and a healthcare worker. A further round of explosions on Wednesday, apparently targeting the group’s walkie-talkie radios, injured dozens more.

The scale of the pager attack was “far greater” than that of the Beirut port blast some four years earlier, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history, which left more than 7,000 injured, Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, said on Wednesday.

The United Nations General Assembly voted 124-14 on Wednesday to strip Israel of the right to self-defense in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

The test of the resolution was based on the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory was illegal.

The resolution also calls on member states not to sell arms or military equipment to Israel that would be used in Gaza, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem.

Among the 43 countries that abstained were Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Some 12 of the 27 European Union countries abstained, including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden.

The Houthi official’s remarks came a day after a ballistic missile fired from Yemen reached central Israel for the first time, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn Israel would inflict a “heavy price” on the rebel group.

“There is always communication after every operation we conduct,” Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthi movement’s political bureau, told Al Jazeera Mubasher TV. “These calls are based on either threats or presenting some temptations, but they have given up to achieve any accomplishment in that direction.”

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the remarks “a total fabrication.”

Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.

The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AR924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.

Independent cybersecurity experts who have studied footage of the attacks said it was clear that the strength and speed of the explosions were caused by a type of explosive material.

CAIRO - 17 September 2024: Israel has acknowledged the theft of 18 containers filled with military equipment and weapons from an army camp near the Gaza border, according to a report by Channel 14, a media outlet close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report, released Monday evening, highlights a major security breach on Israel's southern front.

Israeli security agencies are now investigating how military-grade weapons have leaked from the Israeli army into the hands of Palestinian factions in Gaza and the West Bank. This follows the shocking discovery that Palestinian groups in Gaza have accumulated a substantial arsenal of Israeli weapons, in addition to the homemade arms they have been manufacturing in underground tunnels over the years.

The US has imposed sanctions on yet another Israeli spyware firm, Intellexa, citing the “threats” that it poses to national security. The move comes in the wake of the ongoing global scandal surrounding Israeli spyware companies, most notably NSO Group, which has been accused of selling espionage technology to some of the world’s most repressive regimes to target journalists, critics and human rights activists. NSO was put on Washington’s blacklist in 2021, again over national security concerns.

Three years on from the global NSO scandal, the proliferation of Israeli spyware continues to pose a menace, as the US Treasury Department announced yesterday the expansion of personal sanctions against officials linked to the offensive cyber-arms firms Cytrox and Intellexa, developers of the Predator spyware software used for mobile phone surveillance.

Investigations by journalists have revealed that Intellexa’s Predator spyware was sold to a Sudanese militia and even to militants in Bangladesh, highlighting the ongoing concerns about the lack of oversight and regulation around Israel’s cyber-surveillance industry. The most high-profile case of espionage involving NSO technology was that of Jamal Khashoggi.

“Had the US not shielded one side time and again, multiple resolutions of this Council would not have been flagrantly rejected and defied,” Chinese Ambassador, Geng Shuang told the UN Security Council on Monday.

Urging the US to “show a responsible attitude”, Geng called on Washington to “use the significant influence it holds over the party, and take tangible actions to push Israel to cease its military operations without delay, as demanded by the Council resolutions, to give the long-suffering Palestinian people a chance to live.”

Former and current Israeli military officials have said they are losing the war on Gaza while Hamas is winning.Despite having the upper hand on a tactical level, Israel still can’t defeat the Palestinian group, according to Major General Gadi Shamni, a former commander of the Israeli military’s Gaza division.

In an interview with the New York Times published on Tuesday, Shamni said Hamas was winning the war, while Israel was losing, “and in a big way”.

He said the military capabilities of Hamas have undeniably been reduced, but the group still maintains control over Gaza. Hamas members have been retaking towns across Gaza “15 minutes” after Israeli troops withdrew from them, he added.

The official also warned against launching an offensive on Lebanon, saying war there “is easy to start, but very hard to end”.

Eden Golan, who represented Israel at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in May, is set to trade her stage attire for military fatigues.