GAZA: Doubts grew on Thursday over the fate of a Gaza truce plan that, as the week began, had raised hopes of an end to nearly seven months of war between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants.
Israel was still waiting for Hamas’s response to the latest proposal, said an Israeli official not authorized to speak publicly.
Mediators have proposed a deal that would halt fighting for 40 days and exchange Israeli hostages for potentially thousands of Palestinian prisoners, according to details released earlier by Britain.
Any such deal would be the first since a one-week truce in November saw 80 Israeli hostages exchanged for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
The war started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Israel estimates that 129 captives seized by militants during their attack remain in Gaza, but the military says 34 of them are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive, vowing to destroy Hamas, has killed at least 34,596 people in Gaza — mostly women and children — including 28 over the past day, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Much of Gaza has been reduced to a grey landscape of rubble. The debris includes unexploded ordnance that leads to “more than 10 explosions every week,” with more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza’s Civil Defense agency said on Thursday.
Hampered aid
Humanitarians are struggling to get aid to Gaza’s 2.4 million people, hundreds of thousands of whom have fled to Rafah, the territory’s southernmost point, the United Nations says.
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told AFP late Wednesday that the movement’s position on the truce proposal was “negative” for the time being.
The group’s aim remains an “end to this war,” senior Hamas official Suhail Al-Hindi said — a goal at odds with the stated position of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Regardless of whether a truce is reached, Netanyahu vows to send Israeli troops into Rafah against Hamas fighters there. US officials reiterated their opposition to such an operation without a plan to protect the civilians.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has urged the Islamist movement to accept the truce plan.
“Hamas needs to say yes and needs to get this done,” Blinken said Wednesday while in Israel on his latest Middle East mission.
In early April there had also been initial optimism over a possible truce deal, only to have Israel and Hamas later accuse each other of undermining negotiations.
Following a meeting with Blinken, Israel’s opposition leader Yair Lapid insisted that Netanyahu “doesn’t have any political excuse not to move to a deal for the release of the hostages.”
Netanyahu faces regular protests in Israel calling on him to make a deal that would bring home the captives. On Thursday protesters set up over-sized photos of women hostages outside Netanyahu’s Jerusalem residence. In Tel Aviv they again blocked a highway.
Israel protests
Demonstrators accuse the prime minister, who is on trial for corruption charges he denies, of seeking to prolong the war.
Fallout from the Gaza fighting has spread throughout the Middle East, including to the Red Sea region where commercial shipping has been disrupted.
US and allied warships have regularly shot down suspected drones and missiles fired by Iran-backed Yemeni rebels who say they act in solidarity with Palestinians.
Criticism of the war has intensified in the United States, Israel’s top military supplier.
Demonstrations have spread to at least 30 US universities, where protesters have often erected tent encampments to oppose Gaza’s ever-increasing death toll.
Talks on a potential deal to pause the bloodiest-ever Gaza war have been held in Cairo involving US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
Mairav Zonszein, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank, said he was pessimistic Hamas would agree to a deal “that doesn’t have a permanent ceasefire baked into it.”
A source with knowledge of the negotiations said on Wednesday that Qatari mediators expected a response from Hamas in one or two days.
The source said Israel’s proposal contained “real concessions” including a period of “sustainable calm” following an initial pause in fighting, and the hostage-prisoner exchange.
The source said Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza remained a likely point of contention.
Egypt’s mediation
Egypt was involved in a flurry of calls “with all the parties,” the country’s state-linked Al-Qahera News reported, citing a high-level Egyptian official who spoke of “positive progress.”
Martin Griffiths, the UN aid chief, this week said “improvements in bringing more aid into Gaza” cannot be used “to prepare for or justify a full-blown military assault on Rafah.”
The US military since last week has been building a temporary pier off Gaza to assist aid efforts. The pier is now more than half finished, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
In Khan Yunis city near Rafah, foreign aid and borrowed equipment helped to “almost completely” restore the emergency department at Nasser Medical Complex, said Atef Al-Hout, the hospital director.
Intense fighting raged in mid-February around the hospital, which Israeli tanks and armored vehicles later surrounded.
Israel’s army on Thursday said that among strikes over the previous day, a fighter jet hit “a military structure in central Gaza.”
Witnesses and an AFP correspondent on Thursday reported air strikes in Khan Yunis and artillery bombardment in the Rafah area, while militants and Israeli troops battles in Gaza City to the north.
Also in north Gaza, workers unloaded boxes of aid at Kamal Adwan hospital where Alaa Al-Nadi’s son lay motionless in the intensive care unit, his head almost completely swathed in bandages.
Nadi, her own arm bandaged after they were wounded in a strike, feared the hospital’s power could go out, cutting the boy’s oxygen and killing him.
“I call on the world to transfer my son for treatment abroad. He is in a very bad condition,” she said, breaking down in tears.
Doubts grow over Gaza truce plan
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Doubts grow over Gaza truce plan
- Israel still waiting for Hamas’s response to the latest proposal
Gaza population down by 6 percent since start of war — Palestinian statistics bureau
Around 45,500 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, have been killed since the war began but another 11,000 are missing, the bureau said, citing numbers from the Palestinian Health Ministry.
As such, the population of Gaza has declined by about 160,000 during the course of the war to 2.1 million, with more than a million or 47 percent of the total children under the age of 18, the PCBS said.
It added that Israel has “raged a brutal aggression against Gaza targeting all kinds of life there; humans, buildings and vital infrastructure... entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses.”
Israel’s foreign ministry said the PCBS data was “fabricated, inflated, and manipulated in order to vilify Israel.”
Israel has faced accusations of genocide in Gaza because of the scale of death and destruction.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest legal body, ruled last January that Israel must prevent acts of genocide against Palestinians, while Pope Francis has suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s Gaza campaign constitutes genocide.
Israel has repeatedly rejected accusations of genocide, saying it abides by international law and has a right to defend itself after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023 killed 1,200 Israelis and precipitated the current war.
The PCBS said some 22 percent of Gaza’s population currently faces catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, according to the criteria of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global monitor.
Included in that 22 percent are some 3,500 children at risk of death due to malnutrition and lack of food, the bureau said.
Israel warns it will step up Gaza strikes if Hamas keeps up rocket fire
JERUSALEM: Defense Minister Israel Katz warned Wednesday that Israel will step up its strikes in Gaza if Hamas keeps up its rocket fire at Israel.
“I want to send a clear message from here to the heads of the terrorists in Gaza: If Hamas does not soon allow the release of the Israeli hostages from Gaza... and continues firing at Israeli communities, it will face blows of an intensity not seen in Gaza for a long time,” Katz said in a statement after visiting the Israeli town of Netivot, which was recently targeted by rocket fire from nearby Gaza.
At least 12 Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed in Gaza by airstrikes, officials in the territory said on Wednesday.
More than 45,500 people have been killed during Israel's 15-month military campaign in Gaza.
Iran to hold nuclear talks with 3 European powers Jan. 13: local media
- Iran insists on its right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and has consistently denied any ambition of developing nuclear weapons capability
Tehran: Iran will hold nuclear talks with France, Britain, and Germany on Jan. 13 in Switzerland, local media reported on Wednesday, quoting a foreign ministry official.
“The new round of talks between Iran and three European countries will be held in Geneva on January 13,” said Kazem Gharibabadi, Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, according to ISNA news agency.
He added the talks were only “consultations, not negotiations.”
The three European countries had on Dec. 17 accused Iran of growing its stockpile of high-enriched uranium to “unprecedented levels” without “any credible civilian justification.”
They have also raised the possibility of restoring sanctions against Iran to keep it from developing its nuclear program.
Iran has in recent years increased its manufacturing of enriched uranium such that it is the only non-nuclear weapons state to possess uranium enriched to 60 percent, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear watchdog said.
That level is well on the way to the 90 percent required for an atomic bomb.
On November 29, Iran held a discreet meeting with the three European powers in Geneva which Gharibabadi at the time described as “candid.”
Iran insists on its right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and has consistently denied any ambition of developing nuclear weapons capability.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, has long issued a religious decree, or fatwa, prohibiting atomic weapons.
Late Monday, Iran’s security chief Ali Akbar Ahmadian maintained that Iran has “not changed” its nuclear doctrine against pursuing atomic weapons.
The January 13 talks will take place one week before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
In 2015, Iran and world powers — including France, Britain and Germany — reached an agreement that saw the easing of international sanctions on Tehran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program.
But the United States, during Trump’s first term in office, unilaterally withdrew from the accord in 2018 and reimposed biting economic sanctions.
Tehran adhered to the deal until Washington’s withdrawal, and then began rolling back on its commitments.
Gaza babies die from winter cold say medics and families
- Yahya Al-Batran clutched the tiny clothes of his dead newborn son Jumaa, just days after the baby died from the cold in their tent in war-torn Gaza
DEIR EL BALAH: Yahya Al-Batran clutched the tiny clothes of his dead newborn son Jumaa, just days after the baby died from the cold in their tent in war-torn Gaza.
“We are watching our children die before our eyes,” said the 44-year-old.
Their baby was one of the seven children who died from the cold within the span of a week, the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry said on Monday.
“We fled the bombing from Beit Lahia, only for them to die from the cold here?” said the child’s mother Noura Al-Batran, referring to their hometown in northern Gaza.
The 38-year-old is still recovering from giving birth prematurely to Jumaa and his surviving twin brother, Ali, who is being treated in an intensive care unit at a hospital in southern Gaza.
Completely destitute and repeatedly displaced by the Israel aggression on Gaza, the Batran family live in a makeshift tent in Deir el-Balah made of worn-out blankets and fabric.
Like hundreds of others now living in a date palm orchard, they have struggled to keep warm and dry amid heavy rains and temperatures that have dropped as low as eight degrees Celsius (46 degrees Fahrenheit).
“We don’t have enough blankets or suitable clothing. I saw my baby start to freeze, his skin turned blue and then he died,” she cried.
The twins were born prematurely and she said the doctor decided to take the babies out of the incubator despite the family not having access to heating.
On a rain-soaked mat, the father hugged his older children tight with blankets and worn-out cloth in a corner of their tent.
He then placed a small pot of water on the stove to make tea, which he then mixed with dry bread to make a meagre lunch for his family with a little cheese and the thyme-based spice blend called zaatar.
Like thousands of other families enduring dire conditions, they face shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, with the United Nations warning of an imminent collapse of the health care system.
In southern Gaza’s Khan Yunis, Mahmoud Al-Fasih said he found his infant daughter, Seela, “frozen from the cold” in their small tent near Al-Mawasi beach, where they were displaced from Gaza City.
He rushed her to the hospital in the area that Israel has designated a “humanitarian zone,” but she was already dead.
Ahmad Al-Farra, a doctor and director of the emergency and children’s department at Nasser Hospital, told AFP that the three-week-old baby arrived at the hospital with “severe hypothermia, without vital signs, in cardiac arrest that led to her death.”
Another 20-day-old baby, Aisha Al-Qassas, also died of cold in the area, according to her family.
“In Gaza, everything leads to death,” said the baby’s uncle, Mohamed Al-Qassas. “Those who do not die under Israeli bombardments succumb to hunger or cold.”
The Hamas government press office in Gaza warned on Monday of the impact of more harsh weather expected in the coming days, saying it posed a “real threat to two million displaced people,” the majority of whom live in tents.
Farra warned that this would likely be accompanied by “the death of greater numbers of children, infants, and the elderly.”
“Life in tents is dangerous due to the cold and the scarcity of energy and heating sources,” he said.
Israeli strikes kill 12 in Gaza as war grinds into the new year with no end in sight
- A strike a home in northern Gaza killed seven people, including a woman and four children
- Another on Bureij refugee camp killed a woman and a child
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza: Israeli strikes killed at least 12 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children, officials said Wednesday, as the nearly 15-month war ground on into the new year with no end in sight.
One strike hit a home in the Jabaliya area of northern Gaza, the most isolated and heavily destroyed part of the territory, where Israel has been waging a major operation since early October. Gaza’s Health Ministry said seven people were killed, including a woman and four children, and at least a dozen other people were wounded.
Another strike overnight in the built-up Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza killed a woman and a child, according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, which received the bodies.
The military said militants fired rockets at Israel from the Bureij area overnight and that its forces responded with a strike targeting a militant. The military also issued evacuation orders for the area that were posted online.
A third strike early Wednesday in the southern city of Khan Younis killed three people, according to the nearby Nasser Hospital and the European Hospital, which received the bodies.
Opinion
This section contains relevant reference points, placed in (Opinion field)
The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and abducting around 250. About 100 hostages are still held in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s air and ground offensive has killed over 45,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It says women and children make up more than half the fatalities but does not say how many of those killed were militants.
The Israeli military says it only targets militants and blames Hamas for civilian deaths because its fighters operate in dense residential areas. The army says it has killed 17,000 militants, without providing evidence.
The war has caused widespread destruction and displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, many of them multiple times.
Hundreds of thousands are living in tents on the coast as winter brings frequent rainstorms and temperatures drop below 10 degrees Celsius (50 F) at night. At least six infants and another person have died of hypothermia, according to the Health Ministry.
American and Arab mediators have spent nearly a year trying to broker a ceasefire and hostage release, but those efforts have repeatedly stalled. Hamas has demanded a lasting truce, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu has vowed to keep fighting until “total victory” over the militants.
Israel sees net departure of citizens for a second year
More than 82,000 Israelis moved abroad in 2024 and only 33,000 people immigrated to the country, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics said. Another 23,000 Israelis returned after long periods abroad.
It was the second year in a row of net departures, a rare occurrence in the history of the country, which was founded by immigrants from Europe and actively encourages Jewish immigration. Many Israelis, looking for a break from the war, have moved abroad, leading to concern about whether it will drive a “brain drain” in sectors like medicine and technology.
Last year, 15,000 fewer people immigrated to Israel than in 2023. The Bureau of Statistics changed its reporting methods in mid-2022 to better track the number of Israelis moving abroad.
Military blames ‘weakening of discipline’ in death of archaeologist who entered Lebanon with troops
In a separate development, the Israeli military blamed “operational burnout” and a “weakening of discipline and safety” in the death of a 70-year-old archaeologist who was killed in southern Lebanon in November along with a soldier while visiting a combat zone.
According to Israeli media reports, Zeev Erlich was not on active duty when he was shot, but was wearing a military uniform and had a weapon. The army said he was a reservist with the rank of major and identified him as a “fallen soldier” when it announced his death.
Erlich was a well-known West Bank settler and researcher of Jewish history. Media reports at the time of his death said he entered Lebanon to explore an archaeological site. The family of the soldier who was killed with him has expressed anger over the circumstances of his death.
The military launched an investigation after the two were killed in a Hezbollah ambush. A separate probe is looking into who allowed Erlich to enter.
The military said the entry of civilians who are not military contractors or journalists into combat zones is not widespread. Still, there have been multiple reports of Israeli civilians who support a permanent Israeli presence in Gaza or Lebanon entering those areas.
