The war in Gaza was resumed by Israel
The Israeli-Hamas Correspondence: Israeli-Israeli Abandonment of the Hamas War, and the Fate of Israel
The campaign to blame Israel’s security services for failing to foil the Hamas attack is what prompted Netanyahu to fire him. It comes on top of a Shin Bet investigation into Netanyahu’s aides who are accused of providing consulting services to countries during the war.
Netanyahu’s far-right ally, Itamar Ben Gvir, was going to rejoin the coalition after returning to war. Ben Gvir had quit because of the January ceasefire with Hamas, and returned Tuesday with the resumption of the war.
It’s the same proposal as before the war, but there’s no demand to remove Israeli troops from the border area.
Netanyahu has a deadline: his government must pass a national budget in two weeks, or face the prospect of his government collapsing, triggering new elections.
Egypt is presenting a new proposal to return to a ceasefire, according to an Egyptian official who was briefed on the offer and not allowed to discuss it publicly but spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity: that Hamas would release around five sick and wounded Israeli hostages and some bodies of dead hostages, in exchange for a ceasefire, the entry of aid and beginning the second phase of the ceasefire deal.
“There’s no other way to explain it: Israel knowingly violated the cease-fire agreement with Hamas – with American approval – because it didn’t want to fully meet the terms it had committed to two months ago,” wrote Amos Harel, a defense affairs columnist for the Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.
The deal’s specific terms couldn’t be officially published. The deal was sealed in the last days of the Biden administration, despite the involvement of the incoming Trump administration. Israel saw itself as having leeway to try to extract new terms under President Trump.
Phase one of the deal — exchanging a group of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners — was over. But phase two — a full troop withdrawal from the Gaza border with Egypt, and moves toward a permanent end of the war — had not begun.
All the while, Hamas continued to recover. Israel had allowed in a surge of aid supplies. Hamas government leaders in Gaza began emerging from tunnels and hideouts, deploying officials and displaying their control of the territory.
In a post that was removed after being criticized by people in Gaza, Hamas stated that it was trying to collect taxes from residents living in the rubble of the previous war.
Hamas was trying to retrofit unexploded Israeli ordinance from the war for its own weapons stockpiles, according to Tamir Heyman, the head of Israel’s leading national security think tank, the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies.
“Hamas haven’t read the picture. They believed they had a lot of leverage on the hostages. And they thought they would get a ceasefire, and not paying anything,” said former Israeli military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin in a briefing to reporters. “This was the target of the attack, it was meant to tell Hamas that they were going to pay a very high price for not accepting proposals, and so on…,” said the author.
Israel began a supplies blockade on Gaza this month to pressure Hamas to accept its terms. Hamas engaged with mediators but did not budge from its core demand to adhere to the original deal, remove Israeli troops from the Gaza-Egypt border and begin talks on the end of the war.
The Israelis were shocked at the return to war. Fourteen out of 25 Israelis who were freed within the last several months said the move jeopardized the lives of 24 other hostages still held in Gaza.
Gaza health officials say that more than 400 people died in nighttime air assaults on homes, including five Hamas officials and women and children. There are differing death tolls for Hamas-affiliated and innocent civilians, and officials in the Gaza Strip do not differentiate between the two.
At 2:10 a.m., Israel launched about ten minutes of strikes from naval ships and dozens of warplanes after weeks of preparations for an offensive that was kept inside closed circles in the Israeli military. Two officials spoke with anonymity to discuss what was happening behind the scenes.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Mediators were holding ceasefire talks with Hamas in the wee hours of the morning Tuesday when the surprise Israeli strikes began, according to a senior Hamas official.
The first 15 months of the Gaza war were disrupted by missiles fired at Israel by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. After Israel resumed the war in Gaza Tuesday, the Israeli military says it intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen toward Israel.
The Up First Podcast: Towards an Efficient Regime against Perturbation in a War of Warped Israel and the United States
“Netanyahu’s true objective appears increasingly clear: a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime, whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts,” wrote Harel.
“The gates of hell have opened? For me the gates of hell have opened today,” Ruhama Buhbut told Israeli Channel 12. Ruhbut’s son, Elkana, is still held hostage in Gaza.
The strikes could last at least another two weeks if Israel passes its national budget, which will give Netanyahu more flexibility to resume the ceasefire, analysts say.
The U.S. struck targets of the Houthis in Yemen over the weekend. President Trump warned Iran, a backer of the Houthis, of “dire consequences” if Houthi attacks do not stop.
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Mueller, DOGE violated constitution, judge says. And, when egg prices may drop, when Ukraine has a major outbreaks of flurries is on track
A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk likely broke the constitution when they shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president is going to appeal the decision.
A truce was announced by Trump and Putin yesterday, where the Russians agreed to stop targeting Ukrainian energy facilities for 30 days. However, hours after the announcement, Russia and Ukraine launched strikes targeting each other’s infrastructure.
Eggs are hard for Americans to swallow right now. Relief may be on the way. According to the USDA, the national average wholesale price of eggs has been declining since February. This is a positive sign that the price for eggs at the grocery stores may drop in a few weeks. The decline in the wholesale price is due to the absence of major bird flu outbreaks so far in March, which has allowed the egg supply to recover.
A Conversation with Noor Abdalla About a Student Deportation for Protests Against the Israel-Gaza War in Gaza
He was charismatic, calm and extroverted. In many ways he was the opposite to her, a self-described introvert who gets super anxious. She said that she would marry him one day.
In protests and in national news, she just wants her husband back in time for the baby’s birth. Listen to our interview or read it.
A Columbia graduate student is in a Louisiana facility, being held over his involvement in student protests against the war in Gaza. The government wants to deport him, but he is legal and is the subject of a debate about what kind of speech can be considered free speech. If Khalil is deported because of his position on the Israel-Gaza war, he will be punished for protected political speech. The government has charged him with no crime and they say they don’t have to under a rarely used immigration provision.
It is not a crime to exercise your First Amendment rights. That’s always been the case,” Noor Abdalla told me. It’s terrifying to know that you can kidnapping someone from their home for going to a protest.