Palestinian Hamas warned Israel this evening that the expansion of Israeli military operations in Gaza City and the displacement of thousands of residents, in the north of the Strip, could have "catastrophic consequences" for negotiations on a ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages.
The extremist organization said in a statement that top political leader Ismail Haniyeh had warned mediators of the "collapse" of the talks, saying that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli army would bear "full responsibility".
Before the announcement, the two sides appeared to have narrowed the gap in protracted talks aimed at establishing a ceasefire in the more than nine-month-old war in Gaza.
Ceasefire negotiations in the Gaza Strip were expected to resume this Sunday, the Associated Press reports.
Hamas wants the deal to ensure the full withdrawal of the Israeli army from Gaza and the war to end.
Israel says it cannot stop the war until the Palestinian extremist organization is eliminated.
The post-war governance of Gaza and security control over the enclave are also contentious issues.
Israel started the war in Gaza after the Hamas attack on the southern Israeli territory on October 7, in which about 1.200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and more than 250 hostages were taken.
Since then, Israeli ground offensives and bombings have killed more than 38.000 people in Gaza, according to the ministry there, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in the balance of casualties.
The war caused massive destruction across the besieged territory and displaced most of the 2,3 million inhabitants, often multiple times.
Israeli restrictions, fighting and violations of law and order hampered humanitarian efforts and famine prevailed.
In an earlier statement, Hamas stated that Netanyahu "continues to put obstacles in front of the negotiations," Israeli media reported.
Hamas accuses the Israeli prime minister of escalating aggression and crimes against Palestinians in what it says is "trying to forcefully displace them in order to frustrate all efforts to reach an agreement."
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The head of the main UN agency that provides aid to Gaza, Filip Lazarini, announced today that half of the buildings there were destroyed during the war between Israel and Hamas.
He also said that more than 500 people were killed in the attacks on those facilities, including employees and displaced Palestinians who took refuge there, the Associated Press reported.
Lazarini, the Commissioner General of the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said this at a press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelati, who reiterated Egypt's support for the agency.
Israel has accused UNRWA of collaborating with Hamas and other armed forces in Gaza and of only prolonging the decades-long Palestinian refugee crisis, which the agency vehemently denies.
UNRWA has been providing basic services to millions of Palestinian refugees since the 1948 war, which broke out after the establishment of Israel, and is helping their descendants, who are the majority of Gazans.
Israeli media reports that Lazarini pointed out the extensive damage after the Israeli army announced that it was operating at the UNRWA headquarters near the Rimal district in Gaza City, where it allegedly found a Hamas tunnel and killed and captured many armed people.
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Israel's Minister of Finance, ultra-rightist Bezalel Smotrich, said today that an agreement with Palestinian Hamas would represent "a defeat and humiliation for Israel and a victory for the leader of that organization, Yahya Sinvar."
Smotrich, a nationalist and leader of a party that advocates the views of religious Zionism, said this before the departure of the Israeli negotiating team for further talks on the hostage agreement in Cairo and Doha, Israeli media reported.
Speaking to reporters ahead of Sunday's meeting of his party's Knesset faction, Smotrich argued that a deal like the one being negotiated "will sentence to death 90 hostages who are not part of the deal and lead to thousands of people killed who will die in the next massacre by Sinvar and Hamas. "
"That is the picture we will see in Gaza, if God forgives, we sign that irresponsible agreement," said Smotrich, holding a poster with a picture of the Hamas leader showing a victory sign.
"Mr. Prime Minister, it is not an absolute victory. It is a complete failure," said the Israeli minister, speaking directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who yesterday presented a list of non-negotiable Israeli demands.
Smotrich added that his party would not be part of the handover agreement to Hamas, hinting at his oft-repeated threat to leave the coalition if the agreement is signed.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, meanwhile, repeated an offer to Netanyahu to back him to move forward on a potential hostage deal, despite opposition from the prime minister's far-right partners in the ruling coalition.
"There is an agreement on hostages, on the table. It is not true that Netanyahu should choose between an agreement on hostages and the continuation of the mandate of the prime minister. I promised him support (safety net) and I will keep that promise," Lapid told reporters, assessing that it was not easy to say, nor is it an easy decision.
He called Netanyahu a "bad, failed prime minister" and that he should be blamed for the October 7 disaster, referring to the Hamas attack from Gaza into southern Israel, but that the most important thing now is to bring the kidnapped people home.
Lapid also called Netanyahu's announcement of red lines before the resumption of ceasefire talks "destructive, harmful and above all unnecessary".
The Israeli delegation led by the head of the security service is already in Cairo to continue the talks, agencies reported this afternoon.
About 120 hostages abducted in the attack of Palestinian extremists led by Hamas on the south of Israel on October 7 are still in captivity in Gaza. In the first phase of the ceasefire, women, the elderly and the sick would be freed.
In addition, the terms of the second phase would be negotiated, when male soldiers would also be released from captivity. In the third phase, the bodies of the deceased hostages would be returned.
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The Israeli army today called on Palestinians to evacuate from several neighborhoods of Gaza City, in the north of the Gaza Strip, towards the so-called humanitarian zones in the south and in the central part of that territory.
Col. Avihai Adrai, Israel's military spokesman for the Arabic language, released a list of neighborhoods to be evacuated along with the call.
As he stated, these are the districts of Sabra, Rimal, Tel al-Ava and Daraž.
The call for evacuation came after the Israeli army launched a new attack this morning on the southern and western parts of Gaza City, while continuing the military operation in the eastern district of Shejaiya, according to Israeli media.
The humanitarian zone is located in Al-Mawasi in the south and in the central part of Deir al-Balah.
Residents began fleeing their homes and shelters in the eastern part of Gaza City last night, when fierce clashes broke out with Palestinian extremists, the Associated Press reports.
It is not known how many people fled, but residents said there were thousands of people seeking safety.
The northern part of the Gaza Strip came under fire in the first weeks of the war and Israel previously said it had taken control of it.
The new evacuation orders are the latest sign that Hamas is regrouping in areas reported to be under Israeli control.
Residents also said that Israeli warplanes are heavily bombarding the eastern and southern parts of Gaza City. Ground fighting in and around Šeđaija has been going on for two weeks.
"We fled in the dark amid heavy strikes. This is my fifth move," said Sajeda Abdel-Baki, a mother of three who took refuge in a relative's home.
The Israeli army announced that it was carrying out counter-terrorist operations in Gaza City after receiving intelligence information about the activities of extremists there.
The statement did not specify in which parts of the city the army is operating.
Fadel Naim, director of Al-Ahli Hospital, which is near the evacuated area, said patients and their companions fled in panic.
There were no orders to evacuate the hospital, but "hundreds of patients and attendants panicked and left fearing the worst," he said.
Patients in critical condition were evacuated to other hospitals in northern Gaza.
The Israeli army renewed its ground offensive in Shejaiya in June, forcing 60 to 80 people to flee.
Meanwhile, ceasefire talks are expected to resume this Sunday and several officials said the devastation caused by Israel's nine-month offensive appeared to have prompted Hamas to soften its demands.
Over the weekend, the Islamist organization appeared to drop its demand that Israel promise an end to the war as part of any ceasefire deal.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that military pressure, including a two-month offensive in the southern city of Rafah that is still ongoing, is what prompted Hamas to enter the talks.
His cabinet announced that Israeli negotiators would resume ceasefire talks with Hamas stalled for weeks in the coming days, signaling progress towards an agreement to end the war, but said a gap still existed between the two sides.
(BETA)
A group representing the families of Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip appealed today to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay his speech in the US Congress until an agreement is signed to release their relatives.
Netanyahu is scheduled to speak at a joint session of Congress on July 24.
Israel and Hamas are currently holding talks through mediators that should lead to an end to the war, the release of hostages held by Hamas, and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons.
The mentioned group called on Netanyahu to give priority to the agreement, before traveling abroad.
"Speech without concrete action to conclude an agreement and bring our loved ones home is premature," said the group representing the families of the hostages, saying that the return of all hostages is currently the top priority.
The families of the hostages are increasingly dissatisfied with Netanyahu, because they believe that his government was unable or unwilling to return the abductees home.
Protests across the country on Sunday demanded that Netanyahu conclude a deal that would free the hostages and called for his resignation.
(BETA)
Britain's Labor government is expected to abandon its attempt to delay the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza, the Guardian reports.
The development came after Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he believed the Palestinians had an indisputable right to a Palestinian state. Starmer spoke to Abbas on Sunday about the "enormous number of lives lost" in Gaza.
He also spoke to Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, stressing the "clear and urgent" need for a ceasefire in Gaza.
"He added that it is also important to ensure the long-term conditions for a two-state solution, including that it should be ensured that the Palestinian Authority has the financial means to function effectively," the report of the conversation said.
Starmer said the situation on Israel's northern border, where fire is being exchanged with Hezbollah from Lebanon, is very worrying and the key thing is for all sides to proceed with caution.
Labor officials said the party still believed the Hague-based ICC had jurisdiction over Gaza. In a submission to the ICC, made by the previous government, the UK argued that the court had no jurisdiction over Israeli nationals. Britain's request to delay the decision was made in secret on June 10, but was revealed by the ICC two weeks ago.
The previous ICC tribunal had given the UK until July 12 to file a full objection, but it now looks unlikely that the new government will follow through, removing a potential delay to the decision by the previous ICC tribunal on the warrant application. arrest.
In its objection, Great Britain questioned whether the ICC could order the arrest of Israeli citizens. The State Department argued that the Palestinian Authority had no jurisdiction over Israeli nationals under the Oslo Accords, and as a result, could not transfer jurisdiction to the ICC.
In 2021, the ICC ruled that, despite Palestine not being a sovereign state, the ICC has jurisdiction over all alleged violations of the Rome Statute, the ICC's founding charter, in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
Israeli forces attacked Gaza City early on July 8, sending columns of tanks into the heart of the city from different directions in what residents said was one of the heaviest attacks since October 7.
The Gaza Civil Emergency Service, which is in the hands of Hamas, said it believed dozens of people had been killed in the eastern Gaza Strip, and that emergency teams could not reach them because of the ongoing offensive in the suburbs of Tel Al-Hawa, Sabra, Daraj , Rimal and Tufa.
The Israeli army said in a statement that it had launched an operation against militant infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, and that it had eliminated more than 30 fighters who posed a threat to Israeli troops.
In the initial chaos of the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel's armed forces deployed the so-called Hannibal Protocol, a directive to use force to prevent the abduction of soldiers even at the cost of the lives of the hostages, according to a report carried by the Guardian.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Sunday, nine months after the attack that killed around 1.200 people and kidnapped another 250 in the Gaza Strip, that the operative procedure was used at three military sites attacked by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians.
Another message to the Israeli division in Gaza at 11.22:XNUMX a.m., about five hours after the attack began, ordered: "No vehicle may return to Gaza."
A source from the southern command told the newspaper: "Everyone knew then that such vehicles could carry kidnapped civilians or soldiers ... Everyone knew what it meant not to allow any vehicle to return to Gaza."
Haaretz said it was not yet clear whether civilians or soldiers were injured as a result of these orders, or how many, but documents and testimony from soldiers, as well as mid- and senior-level Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers, suggested the practice was widespread. on October 7 amid a lack of clear information as the IDF scrambled to respond to the attack.
In response to the report, an IDF spokesman said that internal investigations are ongoing into what happened on October 7 and in the previous period. "The goal of these investigations is to learn and draw lessons that could be used in the continuation of the struggle. When these investigations are completed, the results will be transparently presented to the public," the statement said.
The Haaretz investigation is the latest Israeli media coverage to shed light on failures in military intelligence and operational responses to the Hamas offensive, the deadliest single attack on Israeli soil since the state's founding in 1948.
Israel's campaign in Gaza has still not achieved several of its stated goals. More than 38.000 people have been killed in Israeli operations in the Palestinian territory, according to the local health ministry, and almost the entire population of 2,3 million has been displaced from their homes in a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
Allegations first surfaced in January that the IDF may have used the Hannibal Protocol to prevent Hamas fighters from returning to Gaza with hostages. Although the directive has so far been used only in relation to soldiers, the high-profile incident at Kibbutz Be'eri, in which a brigade general ordered a tank to fire shells at a house occupied by Hamas fighters and 14 Israelis, killing 13 hostages, has raised questions about operational procedures that cause civilian casualties.
Israel's military likely killed more than a dozen of its own citizens during the Oct. 7 attack, a UN investigation said last month.
Also on Sunday, Israel's Channel 12 reported that the sophisticated early warning system on the Gaza border, developed by Unit 8200, part of the IDF's intelligence directorate, was not properly maintained and was known to malfunction frequently. The dossier presented by Unit 8200 officers before Oct. 7 detailed Hamas's complex invasion plans, including attacks on Israeli cities and military positions, hostage scenarios and potential outcomes, the report said.
In November, members of an "observer" unit deployed at two points along the Gaza Strip said they tried to warn their superiors on numerous occasions of unusual activity along the border fence before the Hamas attack, but were ignored. Fifteen female observers were killed on October 7, and another six were taken hostage.
Any ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip must allow Israel to continue fighting until its goals are met, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, while negotiations are expected to continue based on the US plan to end the nine-month war.
Five days after Hamas accepted a key part of the plan, two officials of the Palestinian militant group said they were awaiting Israel's response to its latest proposal.
Netanyahu was supposed to hold consultations late Sunday on the next steps in the negotiations regarding the three-phase plan presented by US President Joe Biden in May, which is brokered by Qatar and Egypt, Reuters reminds.
The goal of the plan is to end the war and free about 200 Israeli hostages who are still in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas dropped a key demand that Israel promise a permanent ceasefire before signing the deal.
Instead, it said it would be achieved through negotiations as part of a six-week first phase, a Hamas source told Reuters on Saturday.
However, Netanyahu said he insists that the agreement must not prevent Israel from resuming fighting until the war's objectives are met.
Those goals were defined at the beginning of the war as the destruction of Hamas' military and governing capabilities, as well as the return of hostages.
"The plan accepted by Israel and welcomed by President Biden will allow Israel to return the hostages without undermining other war objectives," Netanyahu said.
The agreement, he added, must also prohibit the smuggling of weapons to Hamas through the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, and should not allow thousands of armed militants to return to the north of the Gaza Strip.
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns is scheduled to meet with Qatar's prime minister and Israeli and Egyptian intelligence chiefs in Doha on Wednesday, a source familiar with the situation said.
Burns should also visit Cairo this week, along with the Israeli delegation, the Qatari Al Qahera News TV reported on Sunday.
In Gaza, Palestinian health officials said at least 15 people were killed in Israeli strikes yesterday. Among them is Ehab Al-Gusein, Hamas's deputy minister of labor whose wife and children were killed in May, as well as three other people who were killed in an attack on a school under the cover of a church where the families had taken refuge.
The Israeli military said that, after taking steps to minimize the risk of civilian casualties, it hit militants hiding in the school as well as a nearby building where weapons were made.
In the central and northern areas of Rafah, on the southern border of the Gaza Strip with Egypt, Israeli tanks began to penetrate deeper into the terrain and carry out attacks.
Health officials said they found the bodies of three Palestinians shot to death in the eastern part of the city there.
The armed wing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad said its fighters attacked Israeli forces at several locations in the Gaza Strip with anti-tank grenades and mortar bombs.
The Israeli army announced yesterday that it killed 30 Palestinian fighters in Rafah, and that one Israeli soldier was killed in the fighting.
At least 87.828 people have died in the fighting, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. About 2,3 million people live in that Palestinian territory.
(Radio Free Europe)
Yesterday, on the day that marks exactly nine months since the start of the Gaza war, protesters in Israel blocked highways across the country, demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a ceasefire to return hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Near the border with Gaza, protesters released 1.500 black and yellow balloons into the air to symbolize the total number of those killed and kidnapped.
Yesterday's "Day of Disruption" began at 6:29 a.m., the same time Hamas militants launched the first rockets at Israel in the October 7 attack that started the war. Demonstrators blocked major roads and demonstrated in front of the homes of Israeli ministers.
Long-running efforts to reach a truce gained momentum last week as Hamas dropped a key demand that Israel end the war. The group still wants mediators to guarantee a permanent ceasefire, while Netanyahu vows to continue fighting until Israel destroys Hamas' military and governance capabilities.
Mediators from the US, Egypt and Qatar have stepped up efforts in the past week to broker an agreement between Israel and Hamas. In addition, the Hezbollah movement said it would stop its attacks from Lebanon on Israel if there is a ceasefire in Gaza.
The compromise announced by Hamas on Saturday could lead to the first pause in fighting since November and set the stage for further talks, although all sides continue to warn that a deal is not yet a done deal.
The truce would begin with a "full" six-week ceasefire during which hostages - the elderly, sick and women - would be released from Gaza in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
During those 42 days, Israeli forces would withdraw from densely populated areas of Gaza and allow the displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza.
(BETA)
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