January 9, 2024 Israel-Hamas war

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Israel’s referral to the International Court of Justice for alleged genocide during its war in Gaza “meritless” and said it distracts from efforts to address the humanitarian crisis and prevent the war from spreading. 

Blinken also said that Israel has now agreed to let the United Nations conduct an “assessment mission” to begin the process of allowing displaced Palestinians to move back home.

“As I told the prime minister, the United States unequivocally rejects any proposals advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza, and the prime minister reaffirmed to me today that this is not the policy of Israel's government,” said Blinken.

Blinken had meetings with Israeli officials on Tuesday, after meeting with several other leaders in the Middle East on Monday.

South Africa brought the case against Israel to the Hague-based ICJ and the first hearing is slated for Thursday. 

The International Committee of the Red Cross has responded following allegations that its officials told the families of Israeli hostages that they should think of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

On Monday, Dor Steinbrecher, whose 30-year-old sister Doron was kidnapped by Hamas and is still being held Gaza Strip, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the family had been told by Red Cross officials that “we should care more about the Arab people on the other side,” and “less about our beloved one.”

Steinbrecher said his sister needed daily medication.

Tapper asked: “Your parents told this to the Red Cross in the hope that they would be able to get the medication to her wherever she is, and their response was you should be worried more about the people of Gaza? That's what the Red Cross said to your parents?”

 “Yes,” Steinbrecher said, describing it as a “shocking” response.

The ICRC did not address the allegation directly in its response to CNN Tuesday. But it said in a statement:

The ICRC also said it explained to families that its goal was to alleviate the suffering of victims of conflict on all sides. “That, of course, includes the hostages.”

The ICRC added that it had no direct access to the hostages

Watch Dor Steinbrecher's interview with Tapper:

The World Health Organization has stressed that it "cannot afford" to lose the remaining operational hospitals in southern Gaza, warning the enclave's health care sector is collapsing at a "rapid pace." 

As Israeli calls for evacuations continue to push people to the south of the Gaza strip, the WHO said it has strained the region's already stretched facilities. The region's hospitals are now "bursting with patients" and internally displaced people (IDPs), WHO Emergency Medical Team Coordinator Sean Casey told a press briefing Tuesday.

Only 13 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning, and bed occupancy is at 351%, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.

Casey, who has carried out a number of WHO missions to hospitals in Gaza, described the "intensification of hostilities" around the European Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis as "really worrying." 

"We cannot afford to lose any hospital," Richard Peeperkorn, a WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian Territory, said at the briefing.

The Palestinian Authority has condemned an incident in Tulkarm in the occupied West Bank on Monday night in which an Israeli military vehicle ran over the body of a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad soon after a firefight.

Surveillance video of the incident, geolocated by CNN, shows three militants, one of them armed with an assault rifle, running before they are shot repeatedly. A separate video shows a wheeled Israeli military vehicle running over the body of one of the men, dragging it for several meters.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that incident showed the “documented brutality committed by an Israeli military vehicle by running over the body of a martyr in Tulkarm.”

The Al Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, claimed that the three men killed – who were between the ages of 22 and 24 – were its members.

CNN has reached out to the Israel Defense Forces for comment on the incident.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken "stressed the importance of avoiding further civilian harm and protecting civilian infrastructure in Gaza" in his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet in Tel Aviv Tuesday, according to a readout by the US State Department.

It suggests that the two sides discussed a proposal by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — also a member of the war cabinet — in which Israel would not allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza until all the remaining hostages are released. A US official told CNN Monday the matter was expected to be a part of the discussion.

Blinken and Netanyahu "discussed ongoing efforts to secure the release of all remaining hostages and the importance of increasing the level of humanitarian assistance reaching civilians in Gaza," according to a readout State Department.

His meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog also addressed the same issues, while reiterating US support for Israel's"right to ensure the terrorist attacks of October 7 cannot be repeated," according to another readout.

Prior to his meeting with Israeli officials, the top US diplomat, who is on a multi-nation trip to the Middle East, also spoke with Sigrid Kaag, the UN’s Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, "pledging close cooperation with her in this new capacity," the State Department said.

Israel is set to appear before the International Court of Justice this week in a high stakes case that could determine the course of the brutal war in Gaza.

It is an unprecedented case. Experts say it is the first time that the Jewish state is being tried under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention, which was drawn up after the Second World War in light of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

The South African government, a successor to the apartheid regime that was made a pariah on the international stage three decades ago, brought the case against Israel, accusing it of being in breach of its obligations under the convention in its war on Hamas in Gaza.

Israel has firmly rejected the accusation, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it a “false accusation.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Tuesday that his country will present a case “using self-defense” to show that it is doing its “utmost” under “extremely complicated circumstances” to avert civilian casualties in Gaza.

Eliav Lieblich, a professor of international law at Tel Aviv University, told CNN the case is significant politically and legally.

Read more about the international court case.

 A hospital in central Gaza reports receiving dozens of casualties from several parts of central Gaza due to heavy overnight air strikes.

Video shot for CNN shows multiple casualties in the yard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza. The hospital says 57 people were killed and nearly 70 injured. At least 10 of those killed were children, the hospital said.

The video shows people praying for the dead, who had been brought there from Deir Al-Balah, Al-Maghazi and Al-Nuseirat — all areas of central Gaza where there has been heavy fighting and extensive air strikes.

Jamal Naim said he lost his mother, three daughters and three grandchildren.

“We were asleep in a shelter house in Deir Al-Balah. We had evacuated from Nuseirat as we were told it’s safe here. Suddenly at 11 at night, the house was struck. We don’t know why. They struck the room that my daughters slept in. My mother was martyred, [as well as] my three daughters and three grandchildren,” he told CNN.

One of his daughters, 27-year-old Shaymaa, had graduated as a dentist. He had found only fragments of her body.

“It is a crime,” Naim said, “An unjust world. I don’t know where humanity is going. This is a dentist, she was the first in her college with a grade of 95%, one of the best dentists in Gaza.”

The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza said Tuesday that in the previous 24 hours, a total of 126 people had been killed and 241 injured. On most days recently, the Ministry has reported between 100 and 200 people killed. The Ministry said the number killed by Israeli military operations since October 7 had risen to 23,210 with 59,167 people injured.

Some of the heaviest combat is in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where there is fighting on the ground as well as regular airstrikes. Video and images reviewed by CNN show that a 16-story residential block – the Al-Fara residential tower — in Khan Younis had been destroyed in an overnight strike. The streets in the immediate area are strewn with wreckage and rubble.

CNN has asked the IDF whether the tower was targeted in strikes overnight.

One of Israel’s best known actors and entertainers, Idan Amedi, has been badly wounded during combat in the Gaza Strip, according to his family and the hospital where he is being treated.

Amedi, who is of Kurdish origin, is a well-known singer and was one of the stars of the hit Netflix series Fauda, in which he plays one of a special forces unit in the Israeli military.

Amedi is in critical condition in the ICU at the Sheba Tel Hashomer Medical Center, in central Israel, a spokesperson for the facility said.

"There is no danger to his life," his father is quoted by the Israeli website Walla!. 

Shortly before being wounded, Amedi spoke to an Israeli television channel about the war in Gaza.

“It’s crazy, what they (Hamas) built here,” he told Channel 12. “The operation here is on a very central (Hamas tunnel) route. We found kilometers of tunnels here, weaponry, even special weaponry. We’ve been busy the past two days trying to destroy it.”

CNN is unable to verify independently the operational details reported by the Israeli military.

The numbers: On Monday, nine Israeli soldiers were killed in central and southern Gaza, in one of the deadliest days for Israeli forces since the start of Israel's military offensive in the enclave, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

According to the official count, 185 IDF soldiers have been killed in combat in Gaza since October 7.

The number is dwarfed by the colossal death toll of Palestinians in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed at least 22,835 people since October 7, according to a statement issued Monday by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, which draws figures from sources in the Hamas-controlled enclave.

According to the ministry, an additional 58,416 people have been wounded, which means more than one in 40 Palestinians in Gaza have now been injured in the war.

CNN's Ivana Kottasová, Kareem Khadder and Richard Allen Greene contributed reporting to this post.

Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, has reiterated the militant group's stance that Hamas will only release Israeli hostages from Gaza after all Palestinian prisoners are released from Israel's prisons.

“They will absolutely not retrieve their captives except after all our prisoners in occupation prisons are released,” Haniyeh said on Tuesday, speaking at an International Union of Muslim Scholars conference in Doha, Qatar.  

Haniyeh said that Israel “was not able to retrieve a single captive, except only after the resistance accepted the truce agreement.” 

However, Israel said that one of its soldiers abducted on October 7 had been rescued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in late October, before the temporary truce agreement came into place.

In total, 105 people were released by Hamas during a temporary truce with Israel, which started on November 24 and ended early December 1. In exchange, 240 Palestinians were freed from Israeli prisons, mainly women and minors, and many of whom had been detained but never charged.

Israel believes 25 hostages are dead and still being held by in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told CNN on Friday. That leaves 107 hostages from the Hamas attack last year who are still thought to be alive.

Earlier on Tuesday, Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken Tuesday that his nation’s military needs to “finish the war” with Hamas, in order to secure the return of Israeli hostages and achieve the “security of our people.”