Closing summary
A member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October last year has been reunited with his family amid conflicting accounts about his rescue from Gaza. The Israeli military said it had rescued Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, from a tunnel “in a complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip”.
Alkadi is only the eighth hostage the Israeli military claims to have rescued during months of operations in Gaza, including during two operations that killed scores of Palestinians. Israel believes there are still 108 hostages inside Gaza and that more than 40 of them are dead.
An Israeli delegation of working-level officials from the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet will travel to Doha on Wednesday to continue talks with US, Qatari and Egyptian officials with the aim of closing the remaining gaps in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, according to multiple reports.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said that cyberspace needed to be regulated, citing the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Reuters reported. “There need to be laws to regulate cyberspace. Everyone does it. Look at the French, they arrested this man and threatened him with 20 years in prison for breaching their laws,” Khamenei said.
The UN has said its ability to function in Gaza is being crippled by a flurry of Israeli evacuation orders, herding Palestinians into ever smaller and remote areas, days before a critical effort to contain a polio outbreak. Aid workers warn that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of the virus, which was detected there this month for the first time in 25 years.
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
Jen Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office OCHA, has given some details on an uptick in the number of evacuation orders Israel’s military has issued over the past month. Speaking at a UN briefing, Laerke said Israel has issued three evacuation orders since Friday and 16 mass evacuation orders throughout this month. The three issued since Friday have affected 8,000 people in 19 neighbourhoods, Laerke said.
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right extremist Israeli national security minister, threatened that he would build a Jewish synagogue on al-Aqsa mosque compound, the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem. The comments by Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, were condemned by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Israeli officials.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has denied reports that it discovered the hostage Qaid Farhan Alkadi “by chance” during an Israeli military operation in southern Gaza.
As we reported earlier, the New York Times cited senior Israeli officials as saying that Alkadi, a member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, was found during an operation to capture a Hamas tunnel network.
The IDF has been operating in an area of southern Gaza for several days, with the assumption that hostages could be held in the area, the Times of Israel is reporting.
The IDF said there was no planned operation to specifically rescue Alkadi, but the military was looking for hostages in the area, it said.
Israeli delegation to travel to Doha for Gaza ceasefire talks - report
An Israeli delegation of working-level officials from the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Shin Bet will travel to Doha on Wednesday to continue talks with US, Qatari and Egyptian officials with the aim of closing the remaining gaps in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, Axios’s Barak Ravid writes, citing Israeli officials.
Israeli officials have said that they believe that the recovery of Qaid Farhan Alkadi, who the IDF said they rescued from a tunnel in southern Gaza on Tuesday, will put pressure on Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to agree to a deal, according to Ravid.
An Israeli delegation of working-level officials from the Mossad, the IDF and the Shin Bet will travel to Doha on Wednesday to continue talks with U.S., Qatari and Egyptian officials with the aim of closing the remaining gaps in the Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, Israeli… https://t.co/mPZMiQcNQB
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) August 27, 2024
Updated
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared a video of him speaking to Qaid Farhan Alkadi, who the Israeli military said was rescued from Gaza on Tuesday.
In the phone call, Netanyahu told Alkadi that “the whole nation of Israel is excited by his rescue”, and promised to bring everyone else home.
בשיחה עם פרחאן קאדי.
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) August 27, 2024
אנחנו לא שוכחים אף אחד. אנחנו מחויבים להחזיר את כולם, בלי יוצא מן הכלל. pic.twitter.com/6w69lwEp8s
Israel believes there are still 108 hostages inside Gaza and that more than 40 of them are dead.
Israeli forces found hostage 'by chance' in Gaza tunnel - report
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) found Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a member of Israel’s Bedouin minority who was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, by chance during an operation to capture a Hamas tunnel network beneath southern Gaza, according to a report.
The New York Times, citing two senior Israeli officials, writes:
A team led by Flotilla 13, Israel’s version of the Navy SEALs, were combing the tunnels for signs of Hamas when, to the forces’ surprise, they found Mr [Alkadi] on his own, without guards, in a room roughly 25 yards underground, the officials said.
Alkadi, 52, is the eighth living hostage freed in a rescue operation and the first to be freed from a tunnel instead of a house, the report says. Unlike the other seven, he was freed without a fight, it said.
The IDF is still trying to understand why Alkadi was discovered on his own, seemingly abandoned by his captors, officials told the paper.
Israeli media reports suggested that Alkadi may have initially escaped from the tunnel where he was being held and made his own way to where Israeli forces were operating in Gaza.
According to one report, Alkadi was found alone inside a tunnel by IDF troops and it was unclear whether he had escaped or whether his captors had fled. Hamas claimed it had “released” him.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, has called for a three day humanitarian ceasefire to enable a polio vaccination drive as aid workers struggle to contain an outbreak in Gaza.
The spread of polio “threatens all children in Gaza, already weakened by displacement, deprivation & malnourishment,” Borrell posted to X.
The quick spread of polio threatens all children in Gaza, already weakened by displacement, deprivation & malnourishment.
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) August 27, 2024
I urge an immediate 3-day humanitarian ceasefire to enable vaccination by @WHO & @UNICEF – independent of wider negotiations.
Our humanity demands it.
As my colleague Julian Borger reported, the UN has warned that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of polio.
For the immunisation drive to be effective in containing the polio outbreak, the first of two rounds of vaccine must reach 90% of those babies and the rest of the 640,000 children in Gaza under the age of 10. This will need to be achieved quickly to break the transmission of the virus before it spreads or mutates.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) cooperated in the delivery of more than 25,000 vials of vaccine and refrigeration equipment through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza on Sunday, but IDF commanders have yet to agree to a pause in the bombing to allow the immunisation effort to go ahead safely and effectively.
A rocket launched from Lebanon as part of the heavy exchange of fire between Hezbollah and Israel on Sunday was fired from near a position operated by international peacekeepers, according to the UN force.
On Sunday, in a significant escalation of a simmering cross-border conflict, Israel carried out airstrikes in Lebanon and Hezbollah launched a drone and rocket salvo against northern Israel.
The UN’s peacekeeping force in Lebanon, known as Unifil, told Reuters it had detected a “high number of air strikes and rocket launches in its area of operations” starting on Sunday morning.
“One such launch was detected from near one of our positions in Hanniyeh,” a spokesperson said, referring to a town in southern Lebanon approximately 10 km (6 miles) north of the border with Israel. They added:
We continually stress to everyone that using areas near our positions to launch attacks across the Blue Line or targeting that puts peacekeepers in danger is unacceptable and a violation of Resolution 1701.
The Blue Line is the demarcation line between Lebanon and Israel, where parts of the international border are disputed. The UN’s resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, tasks Unifil with ensuring that its area of operations “is not utilized for hostile activities of any kind”.
Several Israeli officials also condemned the comments on Monday by the extremist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, that he would build a synagogue at the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem, al-Aqsa mosque compound.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said “challenging the status quo” of al-Aqsa, also known as the Temple Mount, was “a dangerous, unnecessary and irresponsible act”.
ערעור הסטטוס קוו בהר הבית הוא מעשה מסוכן, מיותר וחסר אחריות. פעולותיו של בן גביר מסכנות את ביטחונה הלאומי של מדינת ישראל ואת מעמדה הבינלאומי.
— יואב גלנט - Yoav Gallant (@yoavgallant) August 26, 2024
הפעולה שביצע צה״ל אתמול לבלימת מתקפת חיזבאללה חיזקה את מדינת ישראל, הצהרותיו של בן גביר - מחלישות אותנו.
Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, said Ben-Gvri’s comments show that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “lost control of his government”.
A statement from Netanyahu’s said “there is no change” to the current policy around al-Aqsa.
Extremist Israeli minister threatens to build synagogue at al-Aqsa mosque
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right extremist Israeli national security minister, has sparked outrage by saying that he would build a Jewish synagogue on al-Aqsa mosque compound, the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem.
Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and champion of the settler movement, told Israel’s army radio on Monday:
If I could do anything I wanted, I would put an Israeli flag on the site.
Al-Aqsa mosque compound, also known as the Temple Mount, is a site holy to Muslims and Jews. It is highly sensitive site, where efforts by a faction of extremist Jewish settlers to pray there are seen as a violation by Muslim worshippers and observers, symbolising efforts to bring the mosque compound and the divided holy city of Jerusalem under total Israeli control.
Ben-Gvir has previously visited the site on multiple occasions. Here’s a clip from his visit in July:
Responding to his comments, Jordan’s foreign ministry said al-Aqsa and the holy sites “are a pure place of worship for Muslims”, adding that it was “preparing the necessary legal files to take action in international courts against the attacks on the holy sites.”
Saudi Arabia and Qatar also condemned Ben-Gvir’s comments, with Riyadh calling them “extremist and inflammatory”.
Updated
Qaid Farhan Alkadi, who Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said was rescued from a tunnel in Gaza, “appears to be in stable and good condition”, Israeli media is reporting, citing the director of the Soroka medical center in Beersheba.
Alkadi arrived at the hospital about 3.30pm local time on Tuesday and is being hospitalised “for supervision, which I hope will be short”, Prof Shlomi Codish was quoted as saying.
Updated
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has released more images showing Qaid Farhan Alkadi, who the military said was rescued on Tuesday “in a complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip.”
The Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian has shared the IDF photographs:
The IDF releases footage showing Farhan al-Qadi meeting with the commander of the 162nd Division, Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, moments after being rescued from a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip, as well as the moment when he arrived at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba. pic.twitter.com/sn6alGYjoP
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) August 27, 2024
As well as images released by the Israeli prime minister’s office:
Images released by the PMO of Farhan al-Qadi at Soroka Hospital pic.twitter.com/pE0G8gJLp3
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) August 27, 2024
IDF says it 'will not rest' until all hostages are recovered
The Israeli hostage rescued in Gaza on Tuesday was recovered by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from a tunnel in “a complex rescue operation”, IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.
Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, a member of the Bedouin community in southern Israel, was rescued in an underground tunnel, Hagari told a briefing.
Alkadi is in stable medical condition and has been transferred to a hospital for medical checks, he added.
The IDF spokesperson did not provide any details of the rescue operation, citing the security of the remaining hostages and Israeli forces. Hagari added:
We will not rest until we complete our mission to bring all our hostages back.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a campaign group representing the families of hostages held in Gaza, has welcomed reports that an Israeli man abducted by Hamas-led gunmen has been recovered by Israeli forces.
The group described the rescue of Qaid Farhan Alkadi, 52, as “wonderful news” and “a sign of light amongst the darkness for the families of the hostages” in a social media post.
Gaza polio vaccine rollout hindered by Israeli evacuation orders, says UN
The UN has said its ability to function in Gaza is being crippled by a flurry of Israeli evacuation orders, herding Palestinians into ever smaller and remote areas, days before a critical effort to contain a polio outbreak.
Aid workers warn that without a humanitarian pause, a vaccination drive due to begin this weekend could fail to reach enough children to stop the spread of the virus, which was detected there this month for the first time in 25 years.
A baby has already been partly paralysed by the disease, and health experts have warned it could spread rapidly given the terrible sanitation and overcrowding in camps for Gaza’s exhausted, displaced population.
“One thing for sure is that it’s almost impossible to lead a polio vaccination campaign at scale in an active combat zone,” said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesperson in the region for the UN child welfare agency, Unicef.
Updated
Jen Laerke, the spokesperson for the UN humanitarian office OCHA has given some details on an uptick in the number of evacuation orders Israel’s military has issued over the past month.
Speaking at a UN briefing, Laerke said Israel has issued three evacuation orders since Friday and 16 mass evacuation orders throughout this month. The three issued since Friday have affected 8,000 people in 19 neighbourhoods, Laerke said. “Only 11% of the territory of the Gaza Strip is not under evacuation orders,” he added.
Laerke expressed specific concern about the evacuation orders issued in the Deir-al-Balah area on Sunday, which he said affected 15 premises hosting UN and NGO aid workers, four UN warehouses, al-Aqsa hospital, two clinics, three wells, one water reservoir and a desalination plant.
“The sum of this is that it effectively upends a whole life saving humanitarian hub that was set up in Deir-al-Balah after its earlier evacuation from Rafah back in May,” he said.
Updated
The Israeli military has rescued one of the scores of people abducted in Hamas’ 7 October attack.
The military said Qaid Farhan Alkadi was rescued “in a complex operation in the southern Gaza Strip”. It did not provide further details.
The Times of Israel military correspondent Mannie Fabian has shared a photo of the former hostage on X.
First image of rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba. https://t.co/nKaonMrRNi pic.twitter.com/R20s4YtGXt
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) August 27, 2024
Here is more from the Associated Press:
The 52-year-old is from Israel’s Arab Bedouin minority and was working as a guard at a packing factory in kibbutz Magen, one of several farming communities that were attacked on 7 October. He has two wives and is the father of 11 children.
Israel’s Channel 12 showed Alkadi’s family members sprinting through the hospital where he was brought after they received the news.
Hamas-led militants abducted 250 people in the 7 October attack, in which 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed in excess of 40,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, who do not say how many were fighters.
It has displaced 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people from their homes and caused heavy destruction across the besieged territory.
Hamas is still holding around 110 hostages, about a third of whom are believed to be dead. Most of the rest were released in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel during a ceasefire last November.
Israel has rescued a total of eight hostages, including in two operations that killed scores of Palestinians.
Hamas says several hostages have been killed in Israeli air strikes and failed rescue attempts.
Updated
Israeli military says Gaza hostage rescued in complex operation
Israeli troops have rescued a hostage in the southern Gaza Strip, the military said on Tuesday.
It said Qaid Farhan Alkadi was recovered in “a complex rescue operation” and said his medical condition was normal, Reuters reported.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has said that cyberspace needed to be regulated, citing the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Reuters reported.
“There need to be laws to regulate cyberspace. Everyone does it. Look at the French, they arrested this man and threatened him with 20 years in prison for breaching their laws,” Khamenei said.
Iran has some of the strictest internet controls in the world.
The day so far
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers. A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children. The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said. Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel. “And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised. Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.
Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.
Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.
Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 18 people, including eight children.
The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike, AP reported.
Another strike late Monday hit a building in downtown Gaza City, killing a child, three women and a man, according to the Gaza Health ministry.
In southern Gaza, a strike on a home early Tuesday killed five people, including a man, his three children as young as 3 years old and a woman, according to a casualty list provided by Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies were taken.
Another airstrike early Tuesday flattened a home west of Khan Younis, killing at least four people, including a child, according to Nasser hospital, where the dead were taken. Footage shared online showed residents digging through the rubble. A man carried a wounded child to an ambulance, while two others carried a dead body wrapped in a blanket.
Palestinian health officials do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are civilians or fighters.
The Biden administration remains in an intense phase of Middle East diplomatic activity working to avoid a regional war while optimistically spinning the prospects for a Gaza breakthrough deal.
Following the latest round of provocative Israeli extrajudicial killings in Tehran and Beirut and the intensified exchange of fire between Israel and Hezbollah over the weekend, the region appeared to lurch further in the direction of all-out war. Preventing that is a worthy cause in itself.
With a US election looming and policy on Gaza, Israel and the Middle East unpopular with the Democrats’ own constituency and a potential ballot box liability in key states, there are also pressing political reasons for a Democratic administration to avoid more war and to pursue a diplomatic breakthrough. Countering domestic political criticism with hope for a deal was a useful device to deploy at the Democratic convention in Chicago and will be needed through to 5 November.
Team Biden is attempting a difficult trifecta. First, the Biden administration is trying to deter the Iranian axis from further responses to Israel’s recent targeted killings in Tehran and Beirut. Joe Biden no doubt has wanted to hold out the prospect of a ceasefire, which Iran would prefer not to upend, whilst he simultaneously bought time for the US to beef up its military presence in the region as leverage and a threat against Iran.
The US is also trying to help a key regional ally, Israel, reclaim its deterrence posture and freedom of military operation after the balance of forces shifted against it during the current conflict.
Hazlash is a funny-sounding Hebrew slang acronym. It means roughly “as you were”, or in a non-military idiom, “back to normal”. Within a few hours of Israel striking thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon in the pre-dawn hours on Sunday, Israel’s wave of morning panic subsided and hazlash set in.
Back to normal wasn’t a given. As people woke up, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was issuing a set of civilian restrictions in preparation for escalation, and the defence minister declared a 48-hour state of emergency.
Beaches and certain public recreational activities were closed all the way from the town of Rishon LeZion, just south of Tel Aviv, to Israel’s northern border. Ominously, Ben Gurion airport shut down. But by 7am, the airport was open again. That’s a big sign of hazlash. In fact nothing is normal, and nothing is at all funny.
The most obvious non-normality is that Israel and Hezbollah are no further from the precipice of war than they were before 4.40am on Sunday morning. Before that, Israel claimed it had assassinated one of Hezbollah’s top military commanders in the heart of Beirut, generating weeks of fear in Israel over Hezbollah’s response (a near-simultaneous assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, presumed to be Israel’s work, prompted fear of an Iranian response as well).
Before that, Hezbollah fired rockets at the Golan Heights that slaughtered a dozen children and teens, all Druze. Before that, and before that … all the way back to the pre-dawn hours of 8 October, when Hezbollah struck Israel in a burst of enthusiasm for Hamas’s 7 October terror attack. The long-term hostilities of course go much further back, and they extend to the longstanding enmity between Iran and Israel.
More than 40,476 Palestinians killed in Israel's war in Gaza, says health ministry
At least 40,476 Palestinians have been killed and 93,647 have been wounded in Israel’s military offensive on Gaza since 7 October, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
Updated
Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon.
Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
Israel’s airstrikes and Hezbollah’s rocket and drone launches that followed soon after was the biggest cross-border engagement since the two sides fought a war in 2006 in terms of the number of aircraft sorties and munitions launched, though not in terms of casualties. Three Hezbollah and allied fighters were killed and one Israeli sailor, killed by fragments of an Israeli interceptor.
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, claimed the pre-emptive strikes on Sunday morning prevented Hezbollah from launching up to two-thirds of the rockets it had intended to fire at Israel. Israel also claimed to have shot down almost all the incoming Hezbollah drones.
Netanyahu issued a warning that the airstrikes would not be “the end of the story”, but reports in the Israeli press cited military sources as saying there was no planned follow-up.
The Irish taoiseach has said he is “deeply disturbed” by the “widespread disruption” to aid operations in Gaza with Polio detect and reports overnight by the UN that 50,000 children born shortly before the war, or since, have not been immunised.
Simon Harris is due to raise what he said are the “catastrophic” issues at a bilateral meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris this afternoon.
“Refusals of food and slow authorisation of passage, meaning fresh food perishes, is unconscionable and shameful,” the taoiseach said in a statement issued in the last few minutes ahead of his trip to Paris.
“We now have a widespread catastrophic risk of polio and other horrific diseases because of ongoing cancellation of humanitarian aid. The UN has rushed more than 600,000 polio vaccines to Gaza and the fact that this life-saving chain would be disrupted with evacuation orders should not be contemplated,” he added.
He called on all sides to abide by the International Court of Justice order on unhindered access for huminatarian aid and said the latest “troubling” pattern of disruption had to be “called out”.
CQ Brown also cautioned that there was also the risk posed by Iran’s militant allies in places such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan who have attacked US troops as well as Yemen’s Houthis, who have targeted Red Sea shipping and even fired drones at Israel.
“And do these others actually go off and do things on their own because they’re not satisfied – the Houthis in particular,” Brown said, calling the Shia group the “wild card.”
Iran has vowed a severe response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which took place as he visited Tehran late last month and which it blamed on Israel. Israel has neither confirmed or denied its involvement, Reuters reported.
Brown said the US military was better positioned to aid in the defence of Israel, and its own forces in the Middle East, than it was on 13 April, when Iran launched an unprecedented attack on Israel, unleashing hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
Still, Israel, the US and other allies managed to destroy almost all of the weapons before they reached their targets.
“We’re better postured,” Brown said. He noted Sunday’s decision to maintain two aircraft carrier strike groups in the Middle East, as well as extra squadron of F-22 fighter jets.
“We try to improve upon what we did in April.”
Israeli strikes across Gaza kill 14, including children, Palestinians say
Palestinian officials say Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 14 people, half of them children.
The Civil Defense, first responders who operate under the Hamas-run government, said three children and their mother were killed in an airstrike late Monday in the Tufah neighbourhood of Gaza City. It said three other people were missing after the strike.
Another strike late Monday hit a building in downtown Gaza City, killing a child, three women and a man, according to the Gaza health ministry, AP reported.
In southern Gaza, a strike on a home early Tuesday killed five people, including a man, his three children as young as 3 years old and a woman, according to a casualty list provided by Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, where the bodies were taken.
Palestinian health officials do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are civilians or fighters.
The near-term risk of a broader war in the Middle East has eased somewhat after Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah exchanged fire without further escalation but Iran still poses a significant danger as it weighs a strike on Israel, America’s top general said.
Air force Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to Reuters after emerging from a three-day trip to the Middle East that saw him fly into Israel just hours after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel, and Israel’s military struck Lebanon to thwart a larger attack.
It was one of the biggest clashes in more than 10 months of border warfare, but it also ended with limited damage in Israel and without immediate threats of more retaliation from either side, Reuters reported.
Brown noted Hezbollah’s strike was just one of two major threatened attacks against Israel that emerged in recent weeks. Iran is also threatening an attack over the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran last month.
Asked if the immediate risk of a regional war had declined, Brown said: “Somewhat, yes.”
“You had two things you knew were going to happen. One’s already happened. Now it depends on how the second is going to play out,” Brown said while flying out of Israel.
“How Iran responds will dictate how Israel responds, which will dictate whether there is going to be a broader conflict or not.”
UN says aid work in Gaza disrupted after Israel orders evacuation of Deir al-Balah area
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Israel-Gaza war and the wider crisis in the Middle East.
The UN says it has had to halt the movement of aid and aid workers within Gaza on Monday due to a new Israeli evacuation order for the Deir al-Balah area, which had become a hub for its workers.
A senior UN official had earlier said that UN operations had stopped completely within the Strip, but officials later clarified that operations “in situ” and “embedded” with local populations would continue.
According to the official, the UN had relocated most of its personnel in operations to Deir al-Balah following a Rafah evacuation order several months ago.
The Israeli military said on Monday it was targeting “terror operatives” in Deir al-Balah and working to dismantle the remaining “infrastructure” of Hamas, whose 7 October attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. The Israeli military has told people to evacuate immediately.
According to the UN humanitarian agency (OCHA), 15 premises hosting aid workers and four warehouses either in or near the area ordered to evacuate were affected.
After it appeared that the UN had shut down its Gaza operations, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for secretary-general António Guterres, clarified that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was continuing operations, although under restrictions.
More on that in a moment, first here’s a summary of the day’s other main news:
The new evacuation orders forced many families and patients to leave al-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of residents and displaced people had taken shelter, for fear of Israeli bombardments. Gaza’s health ministry called for the 100 patients inside the hospital, and the medical teams who remained to care for them, to be protected.
The UN’s World Food Programme warned that the food distribution centres and community kitchens it supports in Gaza are increasingly being disrupted by Israeli evacuation orders.
Five Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike on the occupied West Bank on Monday in the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm, the Palestinian health ministry said in a statement. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck a militant operations centre in the camp, and that troops were separately blocking routes and conducting searches in the West Bank after reports of an abduction.
Israeli settlers shot dead one Palestinian and wounded three others in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem. The Israeli military said it was looking into reports on the settler raid, it added.
Some Israeli officials and media reacted with satisfaction on Monday after a long-expected missile attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement appeared to have been largely thwarted by pre-emptive Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon. Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said Hezbollah had suffered a “crushing blow” from the Israeli strikes but that a longer lasting solution was still needed.
Benjamin Netanyahu faced a political backlash in Israel for the limited nature of Sunday’s airstrikes against Hezbollah, amid calls for a broader offensive in Lebanon. Some of the fiercest criticism came from the far-right wing of the prime minister’s own fractious coalition, which is also increasingly divided over the status of Jerusalem’s holiest site.
The United States continues to assess that the threat of attack against Israel by Iran and its proxy groups still exists, the Pentagon said on Monday, after Hezbollah launched hundreds of rockets and drones at Israel in retaliation for the killing of a senior Hezbollah commander. “I would point you to some of the public comments that have been made by Iranian leaders and others … we continue to assess that there is a threat of attack,” Pentagon spokesperson air force Maj Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters.
The brother of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike, has called for those responsible for his sister’s death to be prosecuted and punished. Frankcom, a 43-year-old from Melbourne who was working in Gaza with World Central Kitchen, was one of seven people killed in April when a convoy of cars was hit by an Israeli airstrike. Israel’s defence force conducted an investigation into the incident, which resulted in two officers being dismissed and three others being reprimanded. Mal Frankcom told the ABC he did not feel this was an adequate response.
Updated
