Israel rejects Hamas ceasefire proposals as US kills Iran-backed militia leader in Baghdad

The drone attack comes in retaliation for an assault on US troops in Jordan

A US drone strike has hit a car in the Iraqi capital, killing three members of the powerful Kataib Hezbollah militia, including a high-ranking commander.

The strike follows tensions in the region and days after the US military launched an air assault on dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria used by Iranian-backed militias and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in retaliation for a drone strike that killed three US troops in Jordan in late January.

The US has blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a broad coalition of Iran-backed militias, for the Jordan attack and officials have said they suspect Kataib Hezbollah in particular of leading it.

People watch as a vehicle that was hit by a drone strike, reportedly killing three people including a leader of a pro-Iran group, is carried away in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Hamas’s terms for a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement, calling them “delusional”.

He vowed to press ahead with Israel’s war against Hamas, now in its fifth month, until achieving “absolute victory”.

“Surrendering to Hamas’s delusional demands that we heard now not only won’t lead to freeing the captives, it will just invite another massacre,” Mr Netanyahu said in a televised evening news conference.

“We are on the way to an absolute victory,” he said, adding the operation would last months, not years. “There is no other solution.”

He made the comments shortly after meeting US secretary of state Antony Blinken, who has been travelling around the region in the hope of securing a ceasefire agreement.

Hamas laid out a detailed, three-phase plan to unfold over four-and-a-half months, responding to a proposal drawn up by the United States, Israel, Qatar and Egypt.

The plan stipulates that all hostages would be released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, including senior militants, and for an end to the war.

Israeli air strikes separately killed more than a dozen people overnight and into Thursday in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, hours after Mr Netanyahu rejected Hamas’s ceasefire terms.

More than half of the strip’s population has fled to Rafah, on the mostly sealed border with Egypt, which is also the main entry point for humanitarian aid.

Egypt has warned any ground operation there or mass displacement across the border would undermine its four-decade-old peace treaty with Israel.

The overnight strikes killed at least 13 people, including two women and five children, according to the Kuwaiti Hospital, which received the bodies.

At the scene of one of the strikes, residents used their mobile phone torches as they dug through the rubble with pickaxes and their bare hands. “I wish we could collect their whole bodies instead of just pieces,” said Mohammed Abu Habib, a neighbour who witnessed the strike.

The US Iraq strike meanwhile occurred on a main road in the Mashtal neighbourhood in eastern Baghdad.

Security forces closed off the heavily guarded Green Zone, where a number of diplomatic compounds are located, amid calls for protesters to storm the US embassy.

A US official said that a senior Kataib Hezbollah commander was targeted in the strike.

Two officials with Iran-backed militias in Iraq said that one of the three killed was Wissam Mohammed “Abu Bakr” al-Saadi, the commander in charge of Kataib Hezbollah’s operations in Syria.