October 23, 2023 - Israel-Hamas war news

Two more hostages have been released from Hamas custody following Qatari and Egyptian mediation, according to two Israeli officials and two other sources briefed on the matter.

The two were identified as Israeli citizens Nurit Cooper, 79, and Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, according to multiple sources.

“They were handed over to the Red Cross at the Rafah crossing a short time ago, from there they will be transferred shortly to Israel. The families have been informed,” the Lifshitz family statement continued.

Hamas also said it released two hostages, according to a statement from Hamas spokesperson Abu Obaida.

“[We] released the two detainees [ ] bearing in mind that the enemy has refused since last Friday to receive them,” Abu Obaida said. “We have decided to release them for compelling humanitarian and health reasons.” 

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed they facilitated in the release of two more hostages.

"We facilitated the release of 2 more hostages, transporting them out of #Gaza this evening. Our role as a neutral intermediary makes this work possible & we are ready to facilitate any future release. We hope that they will soon be back with their loved ones,” ICRC posted to its official X account.

CNN reached out to the Israeli military, which declined to comment on the Hamas statement. The Israeli Prime Minister's Office also said they have no comment.

On Sunday, Israel said it would not respond to the Hamas claim they were "prepared" to release two more hostages, characterizing it as “lying propaganda.” 

On Friday, Hamas released two American hostages, Judith Tai Raanan and Natalie Raanan. 

CNN's Ibrahim Dahman and Tamar Michaelis contributed reporting to this post.

A British-Palestinian surgeon who traveled to Gaza to help in hospitals has warned that without electricity, the hospital he is in “will just be a mass grave.”

Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah said that without electricity “there’s nothing to do for these wounded" who are at Al-Shifa Hospital where he is working.

“The system is disintegrating and without a ceasefire and a humanitarian corridor — not token 14, 15, 20 trucks for two and a quarter million people, but a real humanitarian corridor that allows the evacuation of these wounded and allows humanitarian aid to come in and medical teams to come in — without that, there’s going to be an even larger catastrophe that the one that already exists here,” Abu-Sittah told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. 

Abu-Sittah said the hospital has run out of burns dressings, with more than 100 patients in the hospital with burns covering more than 40% of their bodies.

There are more than 150 patients on ventilators with critical injuries in the hospital, he said, adding that they had also run out of “external fixators — the pins and rods that are required for orthopedic surgery.”

Abu-Sittah told CNN that a number of wounded and inpatients from the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital have been brought to Al-Shifa Hospital.

He said electricity is starting to cut out and there is not sufficient water pressure to run the sterilization machine that's needed for surgical instruments.

The surgeon described treating a 16-year-old boy who “had burns to his face, his arms and his legs.” He said the boy told him how “he had dinner with his parents and his dad, who was sitting next to him, was killed and his mom suffocated in the fire that led to the burns that he had.” 

“We have now a term in Shifa hospital called ‘wounded child with no surviving family’ to designate over 50 kids who have been pulled out of the rubble on their own and have sustained injuries and are being treated in the hospital,” Abu-Sittah said. 

“For a system that had a total bed capacity of 2,500 beds before the war started, we are just waiting for the electricity to run out, the fuel, and then that will be the death… of the health system," he added.

US President Joe Biden called on Hamas to release hostages held in Gaza before entertaining the prospect of a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza Monday. 

Pressed by a reporter if the White House backed a ceasefire in exchange for the hostages’ release, Biden said “we should have a ceasefire” before correcting himself and saying “not a ceasefire, we should have those hostages released, and then we can talk.”

The moment reflected how extraordinarily careful US officials have been to avoid publicly advocating for — and even uttering the term “ceasefire” — since violence erupted in Israel more than two weeks ago. That has been a careful and intentional decision by the administration in response to the shocking scope and scale of Hamas’ October 7 attack. Biden’s first written statement the weekend Hamas attacked Israel did not include the term “ceasefire,” and he and his top officials have not publicly urged for one since. 

In fact, officials said in the immediate days following the attacks that the US was not in a position to urge Israel to exercise restraint – notable given that the US has historically tended to urge for a ceasefire on all sides when conflicts have broken out in the region. 

But as the violence has dragged on and the war now enters its third week, the administration has begun to put pressure on Israel to, at the very least, delay its ground incursion into Gaza — in large part so that the administration can continue to work on getting additional American hostages out.  

John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, rebutted calls for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza Monday, telling CNN that Hamas must first release hostages held in Gaza.

A senior Israeli official told CNN over the weekend that there will be “no ceasefire” in Gaza, and that “humanitarian efforts cannot be allowed to impact the mission to dismantle Hamas.”

“A ceasefire? It simply means Hamas wins, and we lose,” Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday.

The president also offered details on his conversation with Pope Francis Sunday.

In a readout Sunday, the White House says Biden and Pope Francis “discussed the need to prevent escalation in the region and to work toward a durable peace in the Middle East.”

A dual Israeli-American citizen and her husband are missing after their kibbutz was attacked by Hamas, according to members of their family.

Yehuda Beinin, a Philadelphia native who grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Israel, told CNN his 49-year-old daughter, Liat Beinin is missing along with her husband, Aviv Atzili, after Hamas attacked Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7. 

Beinin says his daughter, a dual Israeli-American citizen, is a high school civics and history teacher and also a tour guide at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem. 

Yad Vashem posted on Facebook Sunday about their missing employee. 

Beinin told CNN that Liat’s three adult children are also American citizens. One of them was also at Nir Oz and survived the Hamas attacks, which left 1,400 people, including civilians and soldiers, dead across southern Israel.

American hostages: US authorities have said that they believe fewer than 10 American citizens are being held captive in Gaza after being kidnapped by Hamas during the October 7 terror attacks. Two American hostages, Judith Tai Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie Raanan, were released on Friday.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said Monday that 35 of its staffers have been killed in Gaza since October 7.

The UNRWA had said on Sunday that 29 staffers had died, and on Monday added another six to that grim tally. In addition, 40 of its facilities have been damaged, including two in the last 24 hours, the agency said.

"We are lost for words," the agency said on X, formerly Twitter. "We grieve and we remember. These are not just numbers. These are our friends and colleagues. Many were teachers in our schools. @UNRWA mourns this huge loss."

More than 13,000 UNRWA staffers operate in Gaza, according to its website. Nearly 600,000 internally displaced people are sheltering in 150 of its facilities in Gaza.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will hold public hearings in 2024 on the legal consequences of Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The ICJ announced the hearings in a Monday news release. The hearings are part of a request made last year by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) for a non-binding advisory option.

“The International Court of Justice has decided to hold public hearings on the request for an advisory opinion in respect of the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, which will open on Monday 19 February 2024 at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the seat of the Court,” the ICJ said. 

The UNGA on December 30, 2022 voted in favor of adopting a resolution that requests the ICJ to provide an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s practices “considering the rules and principles of international law, including the Charter of the United Nations, international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”  

The UN General Assembly specifically requests the International Court of Justice to consider: 

What is the ICJ? The ICJ "is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations" according to the court's website. The court was established in 1945 and is based in The Hague in the Netherlands. The court's role is "to settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes submitted to it by States and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized United Nations organs and specialized agencies."

The Israel Defense Forces have told US officials that more American hostages — in addition to Judith Tai Raanan and Natalie Raanan, who were released on Friday — are alive and being held by Hamas in Gaza, a US official said. 

The belief that there are more American hostages alive in Gaza is a major reason Biden administration officials are advising Israel to delay a ground incursion into Gaza, the official said. Still, they cautioned, there’s “no effort here to run intervention on military planning.” There are believed to be fewer than 10 American hostages held in Gaza.

The Raanans are still in Israel after their release, and are expected to go through a debriefing process with US officials, which is a typical part of the decompression process after an American hostage is freed. Those conversations will center on gathering intelligence about the conditions surrounding the Raanans’ captivity that could prove helpful to the administration’s ongoing efforts to get more hostages freed. 

Ten Americans are unaccounted for, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday.

US President Joe Biden also spoke with foreign counterparts on Sunday and discussed, according to a readout from the White House, the hopes for the release of more hostages. Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz all visited Israel last week and French President Emmanuel Macron is set to visit Tuesday. 

The message conveyed to Israel is that a delay helps on several levels, a western diplomat said.

Israel has also been told: “you have our support but you don’t have an absolute blank check, we’ve all got equities in this. Give it a bit of time and space,” the diplomat added.

More on hostages: Israeli authorities said Saturday that it believes 210 people are being held hostage in Gaza. A Hamas spokesperson previously said that the militant group captured between 200-250 people during the October 7th terror attacks.

John Kirby, White House National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, declined Monday to say if the Biden administration was urging Israel to delay a possible ground incursion into Gaza.

On Sunday, CNN reported the administration has pressed Israel to delay its imminent invasion of Gaza to allow for the release of more hostages held by Hamas and for aid to reach Gaza, according to two sources briefed on the discussions.

Kirby would not say if the administration has heard of other countries urging Israel to delay an invasion into Gaza. He instead told CNN that the administration has been in “active conversation” with Israeli counterparts as they pursue Hamas targets following the October 7 attack.

"I won't speak for other nations and what communications they might be having with Israel. I can tell you, we have, since the beginning of the conflict in the early hours, maintained a level of communication with our Israeli counterparts to ascertain their intentions, their strategy, their aims, to see what their answers are to the kinds of tough questions that any military ought to be asking before you launch any kind of a major operation," he told CNN's MJ Lee.

The White House official also reiterated the need for continued humanitarian assistance to the civilians of Gaza. 

"Whether or not there's a ground invasion, we believe that humanitarian assistance flowing to the people of Gaza is critically important, and it needs to go as soon as possible and as much as possible,” he said. "We have been crystal clear with our partners in the region, including Israel, that we want to see humanitarian assistance flow. There's been no change to our posture on that at all."

"But as I said… we're not dictating military terms to the Israeli Defense Forces. They have a right and a responsibility to go after these terrorists, and they certainly are going to do it in a way that they choose to, that they believe is appropriate to the threat," he added.

There are “a lot of factors” contributing to why Americans trapped in Gaza have not been able to leave, even after the first tranche of humanitarian aid was successfully delivered via the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza over the weekend, the White House said.

John Kirby, White House National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, said that while the United States is glad that aid is entering the enclave," we still want to see safe passage out — and particularly for the several hundred American citizens that we know are in Gaza and want to leave.”

Kirby said Ambassador David Satterfield, the US envoy for the humanitarian situation in Gaza, “is on the ground working this very, very hard.” 

The White House official said "there's a number of factors," but pointed to security concerns specifically.

"Certainly Egyptian officials have spoken to this, I mean, there's, you know, they've got legitimate security concerns, and again, we just need to — we just need to work through that,” Kirby said.

He said ongoing negotiations over the release of hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza “makes it impossible for us to publicly detail the efforts that are going on.” 

Kirby declined to offer an exact number of Americans being held, telling reporters the numbers “have fluctuated” since Hamas’ October 7 attack. He said about 10 Americans are still unaccounted for but it's not clear where those people are, "so I would still categorize it as about a handful,” he said.

American hostages, Judith Tai Raanan and her 17-year-old daughter, Natalie Raanan, were released by Hamas on Friday.