January 9, 2024 Israel-Hamas war

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.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock denounced Israeli settlers' violence towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, against the backdrop of rising number of settler attacks.

“It is the responsibility of the Israeli government to implement and enforce the rule of law when people who live here legitimately and are being attacked illegally,” Baerbock told reporters during a visit to the occupied West Bank on Monday. 

Israeli settlers or soldiers have killed at least 340 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said last month that 2023 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2005, when it began keeping records, according to a report from the organization.

CNN previously reported on the violence, including one attack in the town of Huwara, where the assault was so brutal that the Israeli military commander for the West Bank called it a “pogrom.”

Remember: Israel has occupied the West Bank since seizing the territory from Jordanian military occupation in 1967. It later agreed to transfer limited control over parts of the territory to the Palestinian Authority, after agreements signed in the 1990s.

Israel has continued to build settlements in the occupied West Bank. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, encroaching into land that Palestinians and the international community view as territory for a future Palestinian state. Israel views the West Bank as “disputed territory,” and contends its settlement policy is legal.

Berlin speaks up: Germany is one of Israel's closest allies and its government has repeatedly stressed Israel has the right to defend itself. When the United Nations General Assembly voted to demand an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza last month, Germany abstained in the non-binding vote for the ceasefire resolution.

But Baerbock has on Monday joined a growing chorus of leaders have warned Israel to limit the civilian death toll in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed at least 22,835 Palestinians since October 7 -- about 1% of the enclave’s total pre-war population of 2.27 million people.

After a meeting with her Israeli counterpart Israel Katz and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Baerbock said Israel has to “protect Palestinian civilians much better in its military action“ in Gaza. 

It came after Baerbock on Sunday called on Israel to carry out a “less intensive” military offensive in the Palestinian enclave, while stressing a post-war Gaza “must no longer pose a threat to Israel's existence.”

She reiterated Germany’s position that the two-state solution is the “only chance for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side in peace.”   

CNN's Nima Elbagir, Abeer Salman, Eyad Kourdi, Sugam Pokharel, Gianluca Mezzofiore, Celine Alkhaldi, Tara John and Kareem Khadder contributed reporting to this post.

The Israel Defense Forces said nine of its soldiers were killed in the Gaza Strip on Monday, one of the deadliest says for Israeli forces since the start of the ground operation in the enclave.

Six of the nine were killed in Central Gaza, and three in Southern Gaza, bringing the IDF's death toll since the beginning of the operation in the enclave to 185.

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.”

Speaking to Blinken in Tel Aviv, Katz also said that civilians who had been evacuated from towns in northern Israel due to cross-border fighting between the Israeli military and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon could not yet return home. 

“So we have to find a way. A diplomatic way to put a lot of pressure on Iran and Hezbollah to withdraw them as far as we can,” he said, adding: “The thing is to put a lot of pressure now to prevent war tomorrow.”

Katz said it was important to do everything possible to prevent a war with Hezbollah, which he said would “destroy Lebanon.”

Blinken said he had arrived in Israel at "an incredibly challenging time” after making stops in countries around the Middle East. He said he looked forward to sharing some of the opinions he had heard from other countries in the region.

“I know your own efforts over many years to build much greater connectivity and integration in the Middle East and I think there are actually real opportunities there but we have to get through this very challenging moment and ensure that October 7 can never happen again,” Blinken said.

Hezbollah drones targeted a military command center in northern Israel in response to the killings of a Hamas leader and a Hezbollah commander, the militant group said.

The group said in a statement that “a number” of attack drones targeted the command center in Safed in what was Hezbollah's deepest attack into Israeli territory since October 8, the day after Hamas launched attacks on Israel from Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that one “hostile aircraft fell at an IDF base in northern Israel” but said “no injuries or damage were reported.” Interceptors were launched towards other “hostile aircrafts,” the IDF said.  

In response to the latest Hezbollah attack, the IDF said it struck a “UAV launch squad in southern Lebanon” and that “artillery is also striking the sources of the launches fired into northern Israel.” 

Israel killed Hezbollah senior commander Wissam Tawil in a targeted attack in southern Lebanon on Monday, and last week, the deputy head of the political bureau of Hamas Saleh Al-Arouri was killed in a strike on southern Beirut. 

Top US diplomat Antony Blinken is currently meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. 

According to a statement from the Israeli Government Press Office, the meeting is taking place in Netanyahu's office in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv. 

 The US Secretary of State is set to sit in on an extended meeting of the Israeli war cabinet later in the day, according to the statement.

Israel's President Isaac Herzog has told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the legal case brought by South Africa against Israel is "atrocious and preposterous." 

"On Thursday, a proceeding will start in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, whereby South Africa has sued Israel for supposed genocide. There's nothing more atrocious and preposterous than this claim," Herzog told reporters in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters after their meeting, Herzog thanked Blinken for his "steadfast commitment" to Israel's safety.

He said Israel 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. 

"We are alerting, we are calling, we are showing, we are sending leaflets, we are using all the means that international law enables us in order to move out people," Herzog maintained. 

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah announced in its daily update on Monday that at least 22,835 people have been killed in the besieged enclave since the October 7.  The ministry generates its data from hospitals in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Israel began its operation in Gaza immediately after Hamas launched a terror attack into southern Israel on October 7. Its militants killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped some 200 others. 

Some context: What is South Africa alleging? South Africa filed an application last month at the International Court of Justice to begin proceedings over allegations of genocide against Israel for its war against Hamas in Gaza.

South Africa is accusing Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.” It says that “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,” according to an ICJ statement.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah announced in its daily update on Monday that at least 22,835 people have been killed in the besieged enclave since the beginning of the war.

That staggering death toll means that 1% of the enclave’s total pre-war population of 2.27 million people has now has been wiped out.

According to the ministry, an additional 58,416 people have been injured, which means more than one in 40 Gazans have now been wounded in the conflict. The ministry generates its data from hospitals in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Read the whole story here.

Palestinian militant group Hamas is using North Korean weapons in its war against Israel, according to South Korea’s spy agency.

In a response to CNN Tuesday, South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) confirmed an earlier report by the US government-funded Voice of America that Hamas fighters used a North Korean-made F-7 rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

A photo in the VOA report, first published on its Korea service, showed the middle part of a rocket used in the F-7, NIS said.

The F-7 is the equivalent of the Soviet/Russian RPG-7 and Chinese Type 69-1 grenade launchers, according to the Small Arms Survey, which is funded by the Netherlands.

North Korea is a major illicit exporter of small arms and light weapons despite United Nations sanctions aimed at choking off its exports, according to analysts.

The VOA report is not the first to link North Korean weaponry to Hamas. Last October, a senior official with the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said it had evidence of Pyongyang exporting RPGs and potentially other weapons either directly or indirectly to the Islamist militant group.

North Korea’s cooperation with Hamas also likely extends to tactical doctrine and training, the South Korean official said at the time.

South Korea’s claims about Hamas using North Korean weapons come after the United States claimed last week that Russia is using North Korean-made missiles to attack Ukraine.