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Turkey’s armed forces said on Monday some 145-160 Kurdish guerrillas were killed in the military’s air and artillery strikes in northern Iraq this month, raising the toll from between 90 and 100 rebels.
The attacks, the first in more than a year on suspected Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel bases in Iraq, were launched after PKK assaults in Turkey killed more than 40 security force personnel over the previous month.
At least 24 people are dead, including an Iraqi lawmaker, and dozens more wounded in a suicide bomb attack on Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque.
Officials say the bomber blew himself inside the Um al-Qura mosque during prayers on August 28.
Parliamentarian Khalid al-Fahdawi was among those killed.
Israeli air strikes have killed five people in Gaza, while a barrage of rockets fired by Palestinian militants into Israel has wounded a baby.
Two Islamic Jihad leaders died and three civilians, one of them a tunnel smuggler, Palestinian medics said.
Meanwhile, Gaza militants have fired 19 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel since Wednesday, the army said.
Turkey’s military said Tuesday its air strikes on suspected Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq this week have killed an estimated 90 to 100 guerrillas and warned that it would press ahead with offensives against the group both inside Turkey and across the border.
In a statement posted on its website, the military also said more than 80 rebels were injured in six days of cross-border air raids that began on Wednesday, hours after eight soldiers and a government-paid village guard were killed in an ambush by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, near the border with Iraq.
“According to initial information obtained, between 90 and 100 terrorists were rendered ineffective, more than 80 wounded terrorists were moved to hospitals or villages, and contact with a high number of terrorists was cut,” the military said. “Rendered ineffective” is a term used by the military to refer to rebels killed.
Hamas has agreed to enforce a cease-fire on smaller Palestinian factions in Gaza, which have been responsible for most of the rockets fired at Israel in the escalation of recent days, a Palestinian officials said on Monday.
One official who was involved in mediating talks between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza said the groups had “reached an understanding on a truce and that the truce has started.”
Officials said that Israel and the Hamas Islamist group which controls the Gaza Strip have agreed to a cease-fire after five days of cross-border violence.