Hamas and the West Bank: The Israeli-Hamas Conflict in the Middle East and the Security Situation in the Gaza Strip, as reported by NPR
The situation is getting worse each minute. The entire Gaza Strip has become one of the most dangerous places in the world because there is no’safe’ zone. There is nowhere to go as shelters, including UNRWA are overflowing,” the agency said on X.
Israeli commanders estimate they’ve killed thousands of Hamas fighters since the war began. Israeli officials said those estimates were based in part on the assumption that between 200 and 250 Hamas fighters had been killed if Israeli troops said they wiped out a Hamas battalion, and that if a commander was targeted and killed, a team of five or six people had died with him. Confirmation that a commander had been killed could take days to come, officials said.
Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, warned that Israel could lose its “strategic superiority” if it does not 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.
“We are often asked about the destruction in Gaza,” Halevi said. “Our forces find weapons in almost every house, terrorists are found in many houses, and we fight them,” said the spokesman for the army.
The use of fire requires both to protect our forces and to damage the enemy. That is why they operate powerfully” while still going to “great efforts to minimize harm” to civilians, Halevi said.
Carter said clearing operations take a long time. “They still have to conduct military operations in areas that they have already cleared, even though Hamas fighters are attacking their positions in those areas.”
A week-long cease-fire between Israel and Hamas last month allowed for the release of more than 100 hostages, all of them women and children, in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention.
Released hostages castigated the Israeli government officials for claiming to have intelligence on Hamas locations yet bombing indiscriminately. They said that they were more afraid of Israeli bombs in captivity.
NPR’s Scott Neuman and Eleanor Beardsley reported from Tel Aviv and Brian Mann from Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. NPR producer Anas Baba contributed from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.
The Israel Defense Force said on Wednesday that its air force had hit a number of targets in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours and ground troops continued to locate and destroy weapons.
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.
The Palestinian territory’s second-largest city, Khan Younos, was the scene of some of the most intense fighting since the start of the Israel-Gaza war two months ago.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Israeli military also said that the northern brigade, Hamas’s second largest, had been “significantly damaged.” The Israeli military claimed it inflicted serious damage on the Gaza City brigade.
The army said that it had eliminated the heads of Hamas’s aerial division, two battalion commanders, and a brigade commander.
Israel’s attack on a Hamas enclave: A warning to Israel about its actions against the militant group Al–Qassam
On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu said in a video posted on the X platform: “Our forces are encircling Sinwar’s house. He can escape, but it will take us some time to reach him.
Even if Israel succeeds in killing the group’s current leaders, it’s not clear if they will be able to remove Hamas 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 military wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam, confirmed last month that at least three of the men in the picture had been killed, including Ahmed al-Ghandour, the northern Gaza military leader known as Abu Anas, and his deputy, Wael Rajab. Another was a Hamas battalion commander. In November, a spokesman for the Israeli military said its forces had attacked an underground site where Mr. al-Ghandour had been hiding.
The leaders in the photo are seated at a table with fruit, drinks and other food. There are hundreds of tunnels constructed by Hamas beneath the enclave.
Israel, he said, in a nod to the current strategy, had killed “about half of Hamas’s battalion commanders.” He did not give names or details of those who were killed.
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 the Oct. 7 attacks and the “ravages of Israeli women and girls“
According to the State Department, one of the reasons they don’t want to give women the opportunity to discuss what happened to them during their time in custody is that they don’t want those women to be able to talk about it.
And in a Wednesday letter to the U.N. Security Council about the dangers faced by civilians in Gaza, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged the Oct. 7 allegations. “Accounts of sexual violence during the attacks are appalling,” he wrote.
Sexual violence need to be thoroughly investigated. We need to make sure that justice is served because that’s what we owe the victims,” Türk said.
“To these organizations, Israeli women are not women. The rape of Israelis is not rape. Their silence has been deafening,” Erdan said Monday. The evidence of the Hamas assaults was sent to UN Women, but they did not respond, he said.
“These were not merely sick, spur-of- the-moment decisions to destroy Israeli women and girls,” said Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. “This was premeditated. This was planned. This was ordered.
Many young women who arrived in bloody, shredded rags or just in underwear had very bloody underwear. A leader of her unit “saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or shot in the breast” in what “seemed to be a systematic genital mutilation of a group of victims,” Mendes added.
For weeks after Oct. 7, staff members worked through hundreds of bodies, many of them charred, injured or mutilated beyond recognition, she said. Some arrived at the base with 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 the October 7 attack at the U.N. heightened by the day-of-the-night news of Hamas militants
A survivor at the nova rave said that “everything was an apocalypse of corpses” with dead people who were missing clothes, Reichert said.
A top cop in Israel gave a speech about testimonies from survivors of the attacks and first responders.
“I’m standing in front of you to make sure that you hear the voices of those women that cannot stand next to us now and be here to scream out what happened to them,” Greiniman said.
“She was naked. She had nails and different objects in her female organs,” he said, visibly emotional and hesitating between words. “She was abused in a way we could not understand and could not deal with.”
Simcha Greiniman was a volunteer rescue worker who helped collect bodies on October 7.
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 the United Nations rose this week as a result of a session that included firsthand accounts of injuries they saw on the bodies of victims.
The Israeli government has shared what they say is proof Hamas fighters committed rape and other sexual assaults against hundreds of women in an attack on Israel in October.