Israel is engaged in its heaviest fighting yet in Gaza
Israel’s “strategic defeat” is tearing it apart: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with the families of Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip
“[T]he situation is getting worse each minute. The Gaza Strip is one of the most dangerous places in the world. The agency said that there is no place to go as shelters are overflowing.
Nearly three-quarters of the population in Gaza have been homeless because of the fighting. International pressure from the death and suffering inflicted on Gazans has brought pressure on Israel to protect Palestinian civilians.
Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense for U.S., warned last week that Israel risks “strategic defeat” if it doesn’t protect Palestinians in Gaza.
“The center of gravity is the civilian population and if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat,” Austin said.
“Hamas wanted to tear us apart; we are tearing it apart,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday, after meeting with the families of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu’s government is under pressure over whether to continue to pummel Hamas or broker another truce that would allow for more exchanges.
The Gaza Strip is a “Strong Threat” for the Security Council, and Israel Defense Forces are Responding Fast to Hamas Attacks
“These things need the use of a wide range of fire to damage the enemy and protect our forces.” That is why they operate powerfully” while still going to “great efforts to minimize harm” to civilians, Halevi said.
Speaking to NPR, Brian Carter, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Critical Threats Project, which has been tracking the urban fighting in Gaza, tells NPR that Israeli forces have not been making fast progress on the ground.
After being held for weeks in Gaza by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet met some of the hostages who were freed last month.
Israeli officials have also circulated videos of what they say are interrogations of Hamas fighters captured on Oct. 7. In brief video clips played at the U.N. on Monday, two men said they witnessed sexual violence during the attacks.
NPR’s Scott Neuman and Eleanor Beardsley reported from both Tel Aviv and the West Bank. Anas Baba wrote a piece forNPR from the Gaza Strip.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), the IDF said on Wednesday that Israel’s air force had hit 250 targets in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, and that ground troops “continue to locate and destroy weapons, underground shafts, explosive charges and other terrorist infrastructures.”
The statement marked the first time that Israel had acknowledged that ground forces were engaged in and around Khan Younis. Israel released video it said showed soldiers operating in northern Gaza.
He said the Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday were taking part “in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation, in terms of terrorists killed, the number of firefights, and the use of firepower from the land and air.”
At one point, Mr. Sinwar and Mr. Deif were thought to be in Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, where the army and Hamas fighters are engaged in heated urban combat.
There was a lot of heavy fighting in the Palestinian territory on Wednesday, with some of the most intense battles taking place in the city of Khan Younis.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military also said that the northern brigade, Hamas’s second largest, had been “significantly damaged.” It was claimed by the military that it inflicted serious damage to the battalions of the Gaza City brigade.
The photo the Israeli military released on Tuesday was annotated to show that five of the 11 commanders had been killed.
The Israel of Hamas: A Photo of Israel Encircling Sinwar’s House During a Jammu–Nucleus Attack
On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu said in a video posted on the X platform: “Our forces are encircling Sinwar’s house. It is only a matter of time before we reach him.
Even if Israel manages to kill the group’s current leaders, there is no guarantee that Israel will accomplish its stated goal of eliminating Hamas and removing it from power.
Israeli forces have in recent day advanced into southern Gaza in an attempt to find and kill top Hamas leaders believed to be hiding there. That group includes Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, the head of the Qassam armed wing.
The two men who Israel claimed it killed in the photograph were accused of being involved in the planning of the attacks. Asem Abu Rakba was in charge of Hamas’s drone program. The military said so.
The leaders in the photo are seen sitting at a long, low table festooned with fruit, drinks and other foods. Beneath the enclave are hundreds of tunnels Hamas has constructed to hide and transport weapons, fighters and materiel.
He said that Israel had killed about half of all Hamas battalion commanders. He did not provide the names or details of all of the people who died.
An Israeli intelligence unit analyzed the picture after it was seized in Gaza but did not reveal who initially took the photograph. Some of the photograph’s details, including its exact date and location, could not be immediately independently verified.
Israel presses U.N. to investigate charges of sexual violence by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7: “Italy does not condone the rape of Israeli women,” said Erdan
It seems that they don’t want to give women who have been held hostages the chance to talk about what happened to them, because they want them to not know what happened to them.
In a Wednesday letter to the Security Council, the U.N. Secretary-General acknowledged the allegations about civilians in Gaza. “Accounts of sexual violence during the attacks are appalling,” he wrote.
Sexual violence needs to be thoroughly investigated. We need to make sure that justice is served because that’s what we owe the victims,” Türk said.
Israeli women are not women, that is what these organizations want to know. The rape of Israelis is not rape. Their silence has been deafening. In order to get the UN Women to respond to the photo evidence he sent them, he sent them a picture of Hamas’ assaults.
“These were not merely sick, spur-of-the-moment decisions to defile and mutilate Israeli women and girls,” said Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. “This was premeditated. This was planned months in advance. This was instructed.”
“Many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags, or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody,” Mendes recalled. A leader of her unit saw women who were shot in the crotch, vagina, or breast, and she thought it was a circumcision.
Staff members worked for a long time through hundreds of bodies, many of them charred, injured or mutilated beyond recognition. Some of them arrived with their limbs removed.
The evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7, Israel says, is overwhelming: Witness accounts of militants raping women; bodies of women discovered with their clothes removed; others shot through the head and the breast.
Israel’s case for rape and sexual assaults: First-hand accounts of a Nova rave survivor at the U.N.
A survivor from the Nova rave, a music festival where hundreds of young people were killed, told responders that “everything was an apocalypse of corpses,” with dead women who were missing clothes, Reichert said.
Survivors of the attacks as well as first responders who witnessed the immediate aftermath were recounted by Yael Reichert, a superior of the Israeli national police unit.
Greiniman was standing in front of him to make sure that he could hear the voices of the women that couldn’t stand next to him.
“She was naked. He said she had a variety of objects in her female organs. She was abused in a way that we couldn’t comprehend.
Simcha Greiniman, a volunteer rescue worker who helped collect bodies on Oct. 7, recounted discovering the body of a woman laying on the floor of her home.
At the U.N. on Monday, testimony from three Israelis — a police officer, a first responder and a member of a morgue team that processed bodies — described and listed details of Israel’s case.
The pressure on United Nations officials was increased after a remarkable session on Monday that included firsthand accounts of injuries they saw on the bodies of victims.
For two months, Israeli officials have shared what they say proves Hamas fighters committed rape and other sexual assaults during the militant group’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that left 1,200 Israelis dead, including more than 300 women.
