Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday (December 9, 2024) he would not stop the war in Gaza “now”, with renewed efforts towards a ceasefire underway.

Speaking at a press conference in Jerusalem 14 months into the war against Hamas Palestinian militants, he said “if we end the war now, Hamas will return, recover, rebuild and attack us again — and that is what we do not want to go back to”.

Mr. Netanyahu reiterated that he had set the goal of “the annihilation of Hamas, the elimination of its military and administrative capabilities” to prevent future attacks but said that the objective was not yet complete.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on October 23 that Israel had “managed to dismantle Hamas’s military capacity” and eliminated its senior leadership. With those successes, he said, it was time to “get the hostages home and bring the war to an end with an understanding of what will follow.”

In recent days, there had been signs that months of failed ceasefire and hostage release negotiations might be revived and achieve a breakthrough.

Qatar, a main mediator, said on Saturday there was new “momentum” for negotiations created by the election of Donald Trump in the United States.

A source close to the Hamas delegation said at the same time that Turkey as well as Egypt and Qatar had been “making commendable efforts to stop the war,” and a new round of talks could begin soon.

On Sunday, the prime minister met with the families of hostages held in Gaza and said that Israel’s wars on Hezbollah and Hamas would facilitate negotiations for their release.

Protesters, including relatives of the hostages, have repeatedly called for a deal to free the captives and accused him of prolonging the war.

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official data.

During the attack, militants also kidnapped 251 hostages, 96 of whom remain in Gaza, including 34 who the military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 44,758 people, mostly civilians, according to data from the Hamas-run health ministry that is considered reliable by the UN.

A UN truck passes buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, on October 10, 2024 in Kafra, Lebanon. The Lebanese health ministry has reported that a an Israeli airstrike overnight killed five paramedics and rescue workers in the village of Derdghaiya, Lebanon, close to the border with Israel.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday (October 13, 2024) called on the UN chief to move UN peacekeepers deployed in southern Lebanon out of “harm’s way”.

Mr. Netanyahu’s appeal to UN chief Antonio Guterres comes a day after the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, refused to withdraw from the border area despite five of its members being wounded in Israeli fire in recent days.

“Mr Secretary General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately,” Netanyahu said in a video statement issued by his office, in what were his first comments on the issue.

Mr. Netanyahu, speaking at a cabinet meeting, said Israeli forces had asked UNIFIL several times to leave but it had “met with repeated refusals” that provided a “human shield to Hezbollah terrorists.”

“Your refusal to evacuate the UNIFIL soldiers makes them hostages of Hezbollah. This endangers both them and the lives of our soldiers,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

“We regret the injuring of UNIFIL soldiers and we are doing everything in our power to prevent this injuring. But the simple and obvious way to ensure this is simply to get them out of the danger zone.”

UNIFIL has refused to leave its positions in southern Lebanon.

“There was a unanimous decision to stay because it’s important for the UN flag to still fly high in this region, and to be able to report to the Security Council,” UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti told AFP in an interview on Saturday.

Mr. Tenenti said Israel had asked UNIFIL to withdraw from positions “up to five kilometres (three miles) from the Blue Line” separating both countries, but the peacekeepers refused.

That would have included its 29 positions in Lebanon’s south.

UNIFIL, a mission of about 9,500 troops of various nationalities that was created in 1978, is tasked with monitoring a ceasefire that ended a 33-day war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.

Forty nations that contribute to the peacekeeping force in Lebanon said on Saturday that they “strongly condemn recent attacks” on the peacekeepers.

“Such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated,” said the joint statement, posted on X by the Polish UN mission and signed by nations including leading contributors Indonesia, Italy and India.

Palestinians transport their belongings as they flee areas north of Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2024. In recent days, the military has launched an intense ground and air assault in northern Gaza, particularly in and around the city of Jabalia.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Israeli forces widened their raid into northern Gaza, and tanks reached the north edge of Gaza City, pounding some districts of the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, residents said, forcing many families to leave their homes.

Residents said Israeli forces have effectively isolated Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, and Beit Lahiya in the far north of the enclave from Gaza City, blocking access between the two areas except upon their permission for families willing to leave the three towns, heeding evacuation orders.

Gaza’s health ministry said the eight-day-old Israeli incursions in the north have so far killed dozens of Palestinians, with dozens of others feared dead on roads and under rubble of their houses, beyond the reach of medical teams.

Many Jabalia residents posted on social media platforms: “We will not leave, we die, and we don’t leave.”

The northern part of Gaza, home to well over half the territory’s 2.3 million people, was bombed to rubble in the first phase of Israel’s assault on the territory a year ago, after the October. 7 attacks on Israeli towns by militants who killed 1,200 people and captured 250 hostages.

After a year of Israeli assaults that killed 42,000 Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of residents have come back to ruined northern areas. A week ago Israel sent troops back to root out fighters it said were regrouping for more attacks. Hamas denies fighters operate among civilians.

The escalation in northern Gaza has taken place alongside a huge Israeli air assault and ground campaign on a separate front in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah, which like Hamas is an ally of Iran.

“As the world is focused on Lebanon and possible Israeli strike against Iran, Israel is wiping out Jabalia,” said Nasser, a resident of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.

“The occupation is blowing up roads and destroying residential districts. People also don’t find anything to eat, they are trapped inside their homes, fearing bombs could fall onto their heads,” he told Reuters via a chat app.

The Israeli military said in a statement on Sunday that forces operating throughout the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours had attacked about 40 targets and killed dozens of militants.

“The forces of Division 162 continue to operate in the Jabalia region, in the last day the forces killed dozens of terrorists and found explosives, weapons, grenades and other means of warfare in the region,” it said.

The armed wings of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and smaller other factions said their fighters attacked Israeli forces in Jabalia and nearby areas with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.

Palestinian and United Nations officials say there are no safe areas in Gaza. They have also voiced concerns over severe shortages of food, fuel, and medical supplies in northern Gaza, and said there is a risk of famine there.

Some tank shells landed in some streets of the Gaza City suburb of Sheikh Radwan, where tanks arrived at the edges of the territory, residents said, spreading panic among the population further south.

Beirut:

UN peacekeepers in Lebanon warned Saturday against a “catastrophic” regional conflict as Israeli forces battled Hezbollah and Hamas militants on two fronts, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

Israel has faced a fierce diplomatic backlash over incidents in south Lebanon that saw five Blue Helmets wounded.

On Saturday, the Lebanese health ministry said Israeli air strikes on two villages located near the capital Beirut killed nine people.

Israel had earlier told residents of south Lebanon not to return home, as its troops fought Hezbollah militants in a war that has killed more than 1,200 people since September 23, and forced more than a million others to flee their homes.

“For your own protection, do not return to your homes until further notice… Do not go south; anyone who goes south may put his life at risk,” Israeli military spokesman Avichay Adraee posted on X.

Hezbollah said Saturday it launched missiles across the border into northern Israel, where air raid sirens sounded and the military said it had intercepted a projectile.

In an interview with AFP, UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti told AFP he feared an Israeli escalation against Hezbollah in south Lebanon could soon spiral out of control “into a regional conflict with catastrophic impact for everyone”.

The UN force said five peacekeepers have been wounded by fighting in south Lebanon in just two days, and Tenenti said “a lot of damage” had been caused to its posts there.

Around Israel, markets were closed and public transport halted as observant Jews fasted and prayed on Yom Kippur.

After the holiday, attention is likely to turn again to Israel’s expected retaliation against Iran, which launched around 200 missiles at Israel on October 1.

Israel began pounding Gaza shortly after suffering its worst ever attacks from Iran-backed Hamas militants on October 7 last year, and it launched a ground offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon on September 30.

‘Deliberately targeted’

On Friday, Israel faced criticism from the UN, its Western allies and others over what it said was a “hit” on a UN peacekeeping position in Lebanon.

Two Sri Lankan peacekeepers were hurt in the second such incident in two days, UNIFIL said Friday.

Israel’s military said soldiers had responded to “an immediate threat” around 50 metres (yards) from the UNIFIL base in Naqura, and has pledged to carry out a “thorough review”.

The Irish military’s chief of staff, Sean Clancy, said it was “not an accidental act”, and French President Emmanuel Macron said he believed the peacekeepers had been “deliberately targeted”.

Both countries are major contributors to UNIFIL whose peacekeepers are on the front line of the Israel-Hezbollah war.

Efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting have so far failed, but Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati said his government would ask the UN Security Council to issue a new resolution calling for a “full and immediate ceasefire”.

Lebanon’s military said Friday an Israeli strike on one of its positions in south Lebanon killed two soldiers.

In a show of support for Iran’s ally Hezbollah, the speaker of the Iranian parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf visited the site Saturday of a deadly Israeli strike earlier this week.

A source close to Hezbollah said the strike had targeted Hezbollah’s security chief Wafiq Safa, but neither Hezbollah nor Israel has confirmed he was the target.

Ghalibaf’s Lebanon visit, a signal of Tehran’s defiance, comes after Israel vowed to respond to Iran’s second-ever direct attack.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed that the response will be “deadly, precise and surprising”.

The United States is pushing for a “proportionate” response that would not tip the region into a wider war, with President Joe Biden urging Israel to avoid striking Iranian nuclear facilities or energy infrastructure.

Gaza deaths

Iran-backed Hezbollah began firing on Israel in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas following the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures, which includes hostages killed in captivity.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has wrought devastation and, according to data from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, killed 42,175 people, a majority civilians.

Israeli operations in Gaza continue, with the army laying siege to an area around Jabalia in the north, causing more suffering for hundreds of thousands of people trapped there, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

Adraee, the Israeli military spokesman, posted another evacuation warning Saturday for an area near Jabalia.

“The specified area, including the shelters within it, is considered a dangerous combat zone,” Adraee said on X, ordering residents to move to the humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.

Some residents said they were not prepared to do so.

“They tell us to go south, but we won’t go because of the dangers and the army is shooting at people there,” 27-year-old Sami Asliya told AFP.

“There is no safe place, neither in the south nor in the north — everyone is at risk of death,” he said.

On Friday, Gaza’s civil defence agency reported 30 people killed in Israeli strikes in the area, including on schools being used as shelter by displaced people.

An AFP journalist in Gaza reported heavy shelling, explosions and gunfire Saturday further south in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Cairo:

Israeli military strikes on Gaza overnight killed at least 19 Palestinians, medics said on Saturday, while forces continued to push deeper into the Jabalia area, where international relief agencies say thousands of people are trapped.

Residents said Israeli forces continued to pound Jabalia, which is in the north of the enclave and is the largest of the enclave’s historic refugee camps, from the air and ground.

There has been no fresh Israeli comment but the military said in past days that forces operating in Jabalia and nearby areas killed dozens of militants, located weapons and dismantled military infrastructure.

The operation in this area began a week ago and the military said then it aimed to fight against Hamas militants waging attacks and to prevent Hamas from regrouping.

Palestinian health officials put the number of people killed in Jabalia over the past week at around 150.

On Friday, Israeli strikes hit four houses in Jabalia, killing around 20 people and wounding dozens, medics said. The Israeli military has sent troops into the nearby towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya as well as Jabalia and ordered residents to evacuate their homes and head to safe areas south of the enclave.

Palestinian and United Nations officials say there are no safe areas in Gaza. They have also voiced concerns over severe shortages of food, fuel, and medical supplies in northern Gaza, and said there is a risk of famine there.

The Ministry of Health said Israel’s threats to evacuate three hospitals operating there by force put the safety of patients and medical staff at risk.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, aimed at eliminating the operator group Hamas, has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians since it began a year ago, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and has laid waste to the enclave.

The war began after a Hamas-led assault on October 7, 2023, on southern Israeli communities in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

In a statement on Saturday, Hamas said Israel’s “massacre against the civilians” aimed to punish the residents of Jabalia for refusing to leave their homes. It also said it was a sign of Israel’s military failure to defeat the group.

Israel has denied it targets civilians.

The armed wings of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and smaller other factions said their fighters attacked Israeli forces in Jabalia and nearby areas with anti-tank rockets, and mortar fire.

POLIO VACCINATIONS

United Nations officials said on Friday an Israeli offensive and evacuation orders in northern Gaza might affect the second phase of its polio vaccination campaign set to start next week.

The territory’s health ministry announced on Saturday that the campaign would begin on Monday in central Gaza Strip areas and would last three days before moving to other territories.

Aid groups carried out an initial round of vaccinations last month after a baby was partially paralysed by the type 2 poliovirus in August, the first such case in the territory in 25 years.

As in the first phase, humanitarian pauses in the fighting in Gaza are planned, in order to reach hundreds of thousands of children.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Israeli forces bombed and battled Hamas in Gaza City on Wednesday as tens of thousands of Palestinians scrambled for a safe haven after the army issued an evacuation order for a vast swathe of the territory’s south.

Apache helicopters and Israeli quadcopter drones flew above Gaza City’s Shujaiya district as heavy gunfire echoed through the streets, AFP reporters said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected a US media report saying his generals were urging a Gaza truce even with Hamas undefeated, stressing on Tuesday that “this will not happen”.

Military chief Herzi Halevi meanwhile said Israel is engaged in “a long campaign” to destroy Hamas over the October 7 attack and to bring home the hostages held by Palestinian militants.

The United Nations warned that the almost nine-month-old war had “unleashed a maelstrom of human misery” and that the latest evacuation order had plunged yet more Palestinians into “an abyss of suffering”.

Ten days after Netanyahu said the war’s “intense phase” was winding down, the Israeli military again rained down air strikes and artillery fire on militants in the Shujaiya district.

The air force struck “over 50 terror infrastructure sites” across Gaza in 24 hours while ground troops “eliminated terrorists”, located tunnels and found weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, the military said.

Thousands have fled the fighting in Shujaiya, among them Umm Bashar al-Jamal, 42, who was now sheltering in Gaza City’s Yarmouk sports stadium.

“We were displaced five days ago,” she said. “We fled from Shujaiya. We woke up to the sound of tanks. The houses were bulldozed. All our homes!”

The Israeli army — which issued an evacuation order for Shujaiya a week ago — on Monday did the same for a larger area near Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south, raising fears of renewed heavy battles there.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have again taken to the road, many bundling their scant belongings on top of cars or donkey carts as they sought safety elsewhere in the bombed-out wasteland.

– ‘Lives upended’ –

The UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said 250,000 people had been affected by the latest evacuation order that covers southern areas bordering Israel and Egypt.

Almost all patients in the European Gaza Hospital and the Red Cross field hospital decided to flee following the evacuation order, the World Health Organization said.

Though the European Gaza Hospital itself is not under evacuation instructions, the order has impacted operations.

“Now only three patients remain at the European Gaza Hospital and three at the ICRC field hospital,” the WHO said, citing figures from Tuesday.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the southern evacuation order covers 117 square kilometres (45 square miles), “making it the largest such order since October”.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Gaza, Sigrid Kaag, told the UN Security Council on Tuesday that the war had now displaced 80 percent of Gaza’s population.

She also said not enough aid was reaching the besieged territory and that crossings must be reopened, particularly to southern Gaza, to avert a humanitarian disaster.

“Palestinian civilians in Gaza have been plunged into an abyss of suffering, their home lives shattered, their lives upended,” she said. “The war has not merely created the most profound of humanitarian crises. It has unleashed a maelstrom of human misery.”

Amid the war, siege and mass displacement, more than 150,000 people have contracted skin diseases in the squalid conditions, the World Health Organization said.

Wafaa Elwan, a Palestinian mother of seven who now lives in a tent city, said: “We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us.”

She said her five-year-old son, much of whose body was covered in rashes and welts, “can’t sleep through the night because he can’t stop scratching his body”.

– ‘Winds of defeatism’ –

The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza including 42 the army says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 37,953 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

The Israeli military said Wednesday that “operational activities continue throughout the Gaza Strip”.

The Gaza civil defence agency said seven people were killed when a strike hit a family house north of Gaza City.

Another strike killed three people in a car at Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Deir al-Balah area, an AFP reporter said.

The New York Times has quoted Israeli security officials as saying top generals see a truce as the best way to secure the release of the remaining hostages, even if that meant not achieving all of the war goals.

Netanyahu strongly rejected this and vowed Israel would not give in to the “winds of defeatism”.

“The war will end once Israel achieves all of its objectives, including the destruction of Hamas and the release of all of our hostages,” he said.