Israel-Gaza war live updates: IDF in ‘heart’ of south Gaza city; U.S. restricts Israeli settlers’ visas
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • last year • 40 commentsBy: Story by Andrew Jeong, Kelsey Ables, Annabelle Timsit, Adela Suliman, Miriam Berger • 4h
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Israeli forces pierced deeper into the Gaza Strip as part of a new phase of the war , a ground incursion of the enclave’s south after aerial and ground attacks in the north. The Israel Defense Forces is present “in the heart of the Khan Younis region” in southern Gaza, as well as the Jabalya and Shejaiya regions in the north, said Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, who leads the IDF’s southern command. Palestinians in southern Gaza — many of whom came from the north after Israel said the south would be safer — say they have few safe places left to flee . The Biden administration imposed visa restrictions on “extremist settlers” from Israel, as well as Palestinians, “involved in or meaningfully contributing to actions that undermine peace, security, and stability in the West Bank.”
Here’s what to know
- More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population of over 2 million has been displaced, according to the United Nations. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees said shelters were overflowing on Wednesday, and “there is nowhere to go.”
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet met with family members of the more than 120 hostages estimated to still be held by Hamas . At the contentious meeting, the frustrated relatives accused the Israeli government of not doing enough to free the hostages, Reuters reported.
- At least 5,000 Hamas militants have been killed, leaving the majority of the group’s estimated 30,000-strong military wing intact, Israeli security officials told The Washington Post .
- At least 15,899 people have been killed in Gaza, and 42,000 have been wounded since the war began, the Gaza Health Ministry said. At least 1,200 people were killed in Israel during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
5:44 AM: Analysis from Miriam Berger, Reporter covering Middle East, Foreign Affairs
“There’s no room for more displaced” people in UNRWA schools in Rafah in the south, UNRWA spokeswoman Juliet Touma told The Washington Post. “They are way, way over capacity.” In recent days, Israel has urged thousands of Palestinians in the south to flee to already densely packed Rafah, where hunger and disease are spreading fast, the U.N. has warned.
5:21 AM: IDF says it is in ‘heart’ of northern, southern Gaza areas; military says it hit 250 targets in past day
JERUSALEM — Israel’s military said Wednesday it had struck approximately 250 targets in the Gaza Strip over the last day. The Israel Defense Forces said there had been “intensive battles” and use of aerial bombardment. “IDF troops are continuing to locate weapons, underground shafts, explosives and additional military infrastructure,” it said.
The Israeli Air Force also struck Deir al-Balah, an area in the central Gaza Strip, where it said it killed Hamas fighters. Local reports said more than a dozen Palestinians in Deir al-Balah were killed, and more remained under the rubble.
Separately, the head of the IDF’s southern command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman, said late Tuesday the military is “present in the heart of the Jabalya region, in the heart of the Shejaiya region, and as of last night in the heart of the Khan Younis region as well.”
Jabalya and Shejaiya are in the north, while the fast-moving evacuations of residents in Khan Younis have squeezed Gazans into increasingly smaller parts of the south as Israel tells them to evacuate. The orders have also put pressure on aid agencies near the Rafah border with Egypt where many residents have been directed to go, with reports of a lack of shelter, food and water.
Suliman reported from London.
By: Miriam Berger and Adela Suliman
4:58 AM: Analysis from Kelsey Ables, Reporter in the Seoul hub
Israel’s military chief of staff, Gen. Herzi Halevi, said the IDF has entered its “third phase” of operations in Gaza as it expands farther into the south after aerial and ground attacks in the north. Though much of Gaza City in the north has been leveled, Israel has yet to enter some of Hamas’s key strongholds there, and the group remains largely intact, The Post reported .
4:41 AM: Lebanese army: Soldier killed, 3 injured in Israeli shelling near border
A Lebanese soldier was killed Tuesday and three others injured by Israeli shelling near Lebanon’s border with Israel, the Lebanese army said in a statement posted on social media. The death was the first fatality in the Lebanese army since early October from cross-border skirmishes that Hezbollah and allied militias in south Lebanon have engaged in with Israel. Lebanon’s military has not been involved in the conflict. The initial army statement said the attack occurred in Odaisseh, a Lebanese village near the Israeli border.
The Israel Defense Forces said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that its soldiers were not targeting the Lebanese Armed Forces in the attack and that it “expresses regret over the incident,” which it is reviewing.
By: Mohamad El Chamaa and Ben Brasch
4:17 AM: Analysis from Kelsey Ables, Reporter in the Seoul hub
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a news conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday that “Gaza must be demilitarized” after the war and that he believes the IDF is the only force that can facilitate that effort. “No international force can be responsible for this,” he said. Netanyahu previously said he does not seek to occupy or govern Gaza.
3:53 AM: House passes resolution saying anti-Zionism is antisemitism
The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a resolution stating that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, a vote that split Democrats, some of whom said it failed to meaningfully address a rise in Jewish hate in the United States. The resolution, sponsored by Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), passed with 311 votes in favor and 14 votes against it. Ninety-two voted present, and 17 abstained from voting. More than half of Democrats did not vote in favor of the resolution.
Anti-Zionism is generally defined as opposition to the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, while antisemitism is generally defined as hostility or prejudice toward Jewish people.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Rep. Daniel S. Goldman (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), all of whom are Jewish, in a statement called Tuesday’s resolution an “unserious attempt by Republicans to weaponize Jewish pain and the serious problem of antisemitism to score cheap political points.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who voted against the resolution, also criticized it on social media Tuesday, stating it “does nothing to combat antisemitism.”
The House last week passed a different resolution reaffirming Israel’s right to exist and stating that “denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism.”
Nadler said in a speech on the House floor that asserting anti-Zionism equals antisemitism is “either intellectually disingenuous or just factually wrong,” pointing to examples of Jewish anti-Zionism that are “expressly not antisemitic.”
“Most anti-Zionism, particularly in this moment, has a real antisemitism problem,” he said. “But we cannot fairly say that one equals the other.”
By: Kelsey Ables
3:32 AM: Israel pushes into south Gaza. A school is bombed, a hospital, overwhelmed.
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — They were brought to the doors of southern Gaza’s al-Nasser Hospital in private cars, in trucks and on carts.
The injured and the dead had imagined that sheltering in a school would provide some safety. But as has happened so often in Gaza during this war, it did not.
The bodies of about 20 people killed in a strike, wrapped in white sheets, lay in the yard outside the hospital morgue Tuesday morning. Relatives shouted and wept.
The Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday pushed into Khan Younis, expanding their war against Hamas on a new front and bringing fresh terror to Palestinians who say they now have nowhere to run. Until now, southern Gaza’s largest city had been a haven for civilians fleeing Gaza City and the north.
More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million has been displaced, according to the United Nations. Many have gathered in schools and hospitals in the south with the expectation that they would be spared. The school in the Maan neighborhood of Khan Younis was bombed early Tuesday.
By: Loay Ayyoub, Hajar Harb, Loveday Morris, Hazem Balousha and Ruby Mellen
3:03 AM: U.S. restricts visas for Israeli settlers linked to extremist violence
The United States will impose visa restrictions on people believed to have engaged in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced, following repeated calls for Israel to do more to prevent extremist attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians.
The move comes amid a surge of attacks in the West Bank, where rights groups say settler violence against Palestinians has reached record levels since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack .
In a statement , Blinken said the policy was designed to target “individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security, or stability in the West Bank.”
By: Niha Masih and Bryan Pietsch
2:29 AM: Evacuating families in Khan Younis face impossible choices
Families in Khan Younis do not know where to go as Israeli military operations push south.
“Israel said we had to evacuate many areas in Khan Younis, including Sheikh Nasser, but we couldn’t because of the intensity of the attacks,” said 41-year old Fadi Ahmed in a phone call to The Washington Post. Ahmed’s family has already moved once since the pause in fighting ended Dec 1. But when airstrikes began to hit their neighborhood in the early hours of dawn, he and his wife and children tried to walk to safety in the city center.
“[The Israelis] said that hostilities will be concentrated in the east, but we noticed tanks were heading toward the city center,” Ahmed said. “We don’t know which way to go now.”
Moving farther south to Rafah doesn’t seem like an option to Ahmed. “The population density is too high. There is not even a place in the street for us to live.”
By: Hajar Harb and Cate Brown
1:58 AM: Biden says reports of Israeli women sexually assaulted by Hamas are ‘appalling’
President Biden directly addressed the accounts of Israeli women who were raped by Hamas on Oct. 7, calling on governments, international organizations, civil society and businesses to “forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation.”
During remarks at a fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday, he spoke in detail about the accounts that have emerged in recent days after some hostages were returned to Israel.
“Over the past few weeks, survivors and witnesses of the attacks have shared the horrific accounts of unimaginable cruelty,” Biden said. “Reports of women raped — repeatedly raped — and their bodies being mutilated while still alive, of women corpses being desecrated, Hamas terrorists inflicting as much pain and suffering on women and girls as possible and then murdering them. It is appalling.”
Biden also blamed Hamas for the breakdown of the pause in fighting — which lasted seven days — for refusing to release civilian women, who the president said were mostly between the ages of 20 and 39.
“Let me be crystal clear: Hamas’s refusal to release the remaining young women is what broke this deal and ended the pause in the fighting,” Biden said.
By: Yasmeen Abutaleb
1:58 AM: Netanyahu has contentious meeting with families of Israeli hostages
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet met with families of Israeli hostages who demanded that the Israeli government bring home their loved ones whom Hamas militants abducted Oct. 7.
The meeting was intended to be a forum for released hostages to tell leaders about their captivity, Reuters reported , but those experiences were overshadowed by the frustrated families whose loved ones are still in Hamas custody.
“It was a very turbulent meeting, many people yelling,” Jennifer Master, whose partner, Andrey, is a hostage, told Reuters.
About 120 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, according to the Israeli government. The meeting provided a place for families to voice their frustrations with Netanyahu’s government, saying it hasn’t done enough.
Netanyahu said that it isn’t possible to get all the hostages released at once and that Hamas was to blame for the lack of continued hostage releases.
“I fully share the deep concern of the families whose loved ones are still being held in Gaza,” Netanyahu posted on X after the meeting, adding that he had heard “heartbreaking stories.”
“I understand the uncertainty," he said. “I understand the unbearable difficulty. I told the families that we will spare no effort to return their loved ones.”
By: Ben Brasch, Lior Soroka and Naomi Schanen
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The United States will impose visa restrictions on people believed to have engaged in violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced, following repeated calls for Israel to do more to prevent extremist attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians.
Which should amount to zero. Words used for the democrat base.
Netanyahu would welcome you into his far right religious cabinet.
He would welcome me?
Tell us all about me.
If you are not aware of it your hero, Ronald Reagan did much the same when he called Menachem Begin and told him to quit killing civilians when the IDF was bombarding Beirut trying to destroy Hezbollah.
Reagan told Begin that the bombing of Beirut and civilian deaths were a ''Holocaust''.
You mean the man who destroyed half of the Iranian navy?
Never compare him to the Iran lover in the White House.
I see as usual you are adverse to facts, especially concerning your RW hero and half the Iranian navy was six vessels. He is also the man in command when the US Embassy was destroyed by a suicide bomber killing 52 Americans and Lebanese and months later had still not learned his lesson when 241 American service members, mostly Marines were killed and around 80 wounded, the largest bombing against Americans in history and months later the US pulled out of Lebanon.
I'll compare anyone I feel like because it is a fact and facts seem to be kryptonite to you and the rest of the RW.
The Iran lover in the White House is sending much needed weapons to Israeli, some Iran Lover but facts were never your strong point.
Aren't you glad you googled? Don't you wish everyone would?
Those are the facts. Even far left fact checkers admit it.
You cannot deny it.
Didn't have to and yes it would be best if you did.
Never denied that the six ships were sunk but you seem not to be able to accept the facts that I posted about your hero.
And your claim that Biden is a lover of Iran is bizarre at best compared to the facts.
How so?
And your claim that Biden is a lover of Iran is bizarre at best compared to the facts.
He waved sanctions and enriched them. He won't respond to their attacks on our military forces.
Where have I gone wrong Kavika?
By not admitting that many Americans both serviceman and civilians were killed under your hero's term in office.
Have attacked the Iranian proxies, why you keep insisting that we haven't is nonsense.
He waived sanctions that put $10 billion in Oman with restrictions on the use.
It seems most everywhere since he has supplied Israel with weapons and support.
The narrative. You didn't stick to the narrative that Biden is the best thing to happen to the country.
Where did I deny that?
He waived sanctions that put $10 billion in Oman with restrictions on the use.
No, he waved more than that:
the sanctions we imposed on Iranian oil in mid-2018 caused a precipitous drop in Iranian exports. These sanctions became even more meaningful in 2019 when the Trump administration announced that Japan, South Korea, Turkey, China and India would no longer be exempt from penalties if they continued to import oil from Iran. These sanctions alone deprived the regime of as much as $50 billion annually.
President Donald Trump 's maximum pressure campaign against Iran showed the true force of U.S. financial sanctions. The sanctions prevented Tehran from spending the money on malign activities while still protecting humanitarian trade with Iran. Iran's proxies furloughed fighters, were forced to withdraw from Syria and had their pay cut because their backer was out of money. In addition, and unlike previous administrations, Trump's effective use of sanctions allowed us to bring captured Americans home without ransom payment, sanctions relief or pallets of cash. Even Iranian president Hassan Rouhani admitted that Iran had lost $200 billion because of U.S. sanctions. Iranian officials disclosed that the country's oil revenue had decreased from $100 billion a year to just $8 billion in 2019. In addition, Iran's foreign currency reserves fell by 98 percent.
The Biden administration's decision to lift sanctions on Iranian oil undermines American influence and gives Iran leverage in the ongoing nuclear talks. "Sanctions relief" is a sophisticated way of saying "we are giving you money." The pallets of cash that the Obama administration sent to Tehran were offensive, but Biden's sanctions relief is dangerous and sends a bad signal to the rest of the world.
Biden is Giving Up Powerful U.S. Financial Sanctions on Iran | Opinion (newsweek.com)
You didn't deny it but you didn't respond to it and did your best to change the focus to Biden.
As for the Newsweek article, it's an opinion and everyone has one.
Making assumptions isn't the best route to go since you have no idea of my feeling on Biden.
Thank you.
As for the Newsweek article, it's an opinion and everyone has one.
It is not just an opinion. Trump has his foot on Iran's neck. They had no money. Biden turned on the money switch. He kisses the asses of the Mullahs.
The idea that Iran could not fund terrorism without the money Biden allegedly "gave them" is ludicrous.
Trump was able to keep them broke.
I was supposed to care about your feelings for Biden. Sorry, I don't.
This is what I actually said.
''You didn't deny it but you didn't respond to it and did your best to change the focus to Biden.''
You're welcome.
If they didn't have any money how is it that they have kept supporting their proxies and attack the US? Perhaps because they are a huge producer of oil and a major seller of weapons to Russia.
And you make ridiculous claims.
No, you don't that is why I point out your wildly inaccurate posts.
Who was it that ended the Trump policies on day one? Who has been president for three years?
And you make ridiculous claims.
No, Biden is following the same policy that Obama instituted.
Biden's Middle East team might look a lot like Obama's (axios.com)
Feel free to prove me wrong.
I have many times, and in fact on this article.
Your welcome.
That has nothing to do with my answer to you. Your deflections are showing that you know next to nothing about the subject matter.
Which has nothing to do with my response to you. So, it seems that you're out of ammo, in fact you were out of ammo in the first comment.
Cheers
Have a good one!
And remember to always keep googling!
LMAO. We haven't seen you "prove" anybody wrong. All we've seen is lip service.
Best you take off your blinders then.
Cheers
You should follow your own advice it would help you understand what you're talking about and would show you the facts, oh wait facts are kryptonite to you.
Nope. Still haven't proven anything. Can't say I'll wait.
He is trolling you Kavika.
Of course, he is. When you have no facts, you're relegated to trolling.
IIRC,most American presidents have supported Israel militarily with one exception-- Richard Nixon.
It was Nixon who ordered Operation Nickel Grass which airlifted tons of weapons and supplies to Israel in the Yom Kippur War, Krish.
Did you ask permission to hurl that insult?
How about you stop trying to blame other presidents for what Biden has done.
Why in the world would I ask permission to state a fact?
My goodness, Vic you should be able to understand that I'm not blaming anyone simply pointing out the facts about Reagan's actions in the ME. If you can dispute anything that I've posted about Reagan please do.
I also pointed out that Nixon helped save Israel during the Yom Kippur war, isn't history wonderful especially when it's accurate?
Can't help but wonder how many of these deaths were at the hands of Hamas. It's not uncommon for terrorists to slaughter a family, then move the bodies to the location of a fight and claim the enemy killed them.
More than half of Democrats did not vote in favor. How pathetic are these people? I wish I could say I'm surprised but I'd be lying.
Dan Goldman, who is Jewish , and was in Israel on Oct 7th, and is extremely pro-Israel, voted against the resolution because of the language which equates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
It is not that simple.
Spin it all you want. Still pathetic.