February 28, 2024 - Israel-Hamas war

Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday the militant group has displayed flexibility in negotiations but remains ready to continue fighting.

“Any flexibility we show in negotiations out of concern for the blood of our people and to put an end to their great pain and enormous sacrifices…is paralleled by a willingness to defend our people,” Haniyeh said in a televised statement.

“We are reaffirming to the Zionists and Americans…that what they have failed to impose on the battlefield they will not take through political machinations,” he said.

Haniyeh called on Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank to march to Al Aqsa Mosque on the first day of Ramadan.

Lebanon and Israel exchanged fire near the border on Wednesday, a statement from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said.

Approximately “10 launches” crossed from Lebanon into northern Israel, with sirens sounding near Kiryat Shmona, the IDF said.

The IDF said it successfully intercepted “a number of the launches” and “struck the sources of the fire” in Lebanon in response. 

Strikes against Hezbollah military targets were also carried out by the IDF in Ramyeh, southern Lebanon.

IDF fighter jets struck a “Hezbollah weapons storage facility” and “military structures” in Ramyeh, the statement said. 

A “Hezbollah weapons manufacturing site” was also hit by the IDF in the Khirbet Selm area overnight, the IDF added.

Palestinian political faction Fatah told CNN it would attend an intra-Palestinian meeting on Thursday in Moscow.

Earlier this month, Russia invited all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, to meet in Moscow.

The meeting will tackle ways to “unite the Palestinian factions under the Palestinian Liberation Organization,” Fatah spokesperson Hussein Hamayel told CNN. The aim is to form a new government capable of working in East Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, he said.

Fatah controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank, which held administrative control over Gaza until 2007. Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections in the occupied territories and expelled the faction from the enclave. Since then, Hamas has ruled Gaza and the PA governs parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Fatah's delegation will be represented by officials Samir Al Rifai and Azzam Al Ahmad, the spokesperson said.

Hamayel said Hamas had not confirmed its attendance but that he is optimistic they would join and send a “high ranking official from their political office to represent them.”

Hamas has not responded to CNN’s request for confirmation of their attendance.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Tuesday that “all parties” agreed to participate in the Moscow meeting.

Supporters of the movement urging Michigan Democratic voters to check “uncommitted” in protest of the Biden administration's response to Israel's war in Gaza said their campaign had been a success.

“We know Joe Biden is going to be our nominee. So it’s a very, very significant outcome,” former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, a supporter of the “uncommitted” effort, told CNN on Tuesday night.

Levin said that the message that Biden can’t win Michigan in November unless he “changes course” had been “effectively communicated” through Tuesday’s result.

The campaign kept its focus narrow, aiming to convince Biden’s White House to seek a permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

"Uncommitted" campaign exceeds expectations: Organizers of the movement had hoped at least 10,000 people would support the cause, a nod to the 10,700-vote margin that delivered the state to Donald Trump in 2016. 

More than 100,000 voters checked "uncommitted," a raw total well over Trump’s margin of victory in 2016.

A Biden campaign email touting the president’s Michigan win made no mention of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Read more about the impact of the "Uncommitted" protest vote in the Michigan Democratic primary.

Families of hostages in Gaza have started a four-day march from the site of the Nova Festival in southern Israel's Re'im to Jerusalem, repeating calls for the release of those kidnapped on October 7.

"March with us for the hostages," the Hostages Families Forum Headquarters said on Wednesday.

Remember: Hamas militants stormed the Nova Festival on October 7 in an attack that killed over 360 people.

In the attacks on Israel that day, 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 were taken hostage.

There are believed to be 130 hostages still in Gaza, of which 99 are believed to be alive.

Pressure is mounting for a hostage-for-ceasefire deal in Gaza, with negotiations ongoing.

This post has been updated to reflect the latest information provided by authorities.

The last moments of Mohammad Khdour’s life could be those of any American teenager: taking the car out during a study break, snacking on chocolate waffles, posing for Instagram.

Those carefree moments with his cousin along the hillsides of Biddu, in the occupied West Bank, were captured in photos and videos reviewed by CNN.

They were snuffed out, his family says, when an Israeli gunman opened fire on their car, shooting the 17-year-old Khdour in the head.

The death of Khdour, a Florida-born US citizen, just weeks after another 17-year-old American citizen was shot under strikingly similar circumstances in the occupied West Bank, has underscored the frustrations among Palestinian-Americans who say the United States is doing little to respond to the deaths of their loved ones.

Videos from the aftermath of the February 10 shooting show several people rushing to the damaged car, pulling Khdour’s limp, bloodied body out from the shattered glass.

Khdour died hours later at a Ramallah hospital, his family said.

The Israel Defense Forces referred questions about the case to the Israeli Security Agency, which did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Some context: The killing or detention of American citizens in occupied Palestinian territories by Israelis and the concerns about a lack of accountability date back years.

In 2003, 23-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer while trying to block it from razing Palestinian homes in Gaza. Nine years later, an Israeli civil court ruled Corrie’s death an accident.

Read more about Palestinian Americans who were killed in the region.

A small, curly-haired boy walks wearily through the chapel of St. Philip in Gaza City, northern Gaza, as Israeli drones whir overhead.

Smashed concrete and blown-up buildings surround the luminous white walls and pink, stained-glass windows of the church, which has been turned into a makeshift emergency ward for Palestinians wounded in Israel’s military offensive.

Mohammed Taysser Sadallah Al-Zarik, an amputee, is one of those patients.

Al-Zarik, 22, says he was wounded in an attack on the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, which also killed his cousin. His disability was compounded when doctors found a tumor and had to remove another part of his leg, according to his father, Abu Mohammed Al-Zarik.

In recent weeks, the Israeli military ramped up aerial attacks on parts of central and northern Gaza.

Entire families have been erased and displacement shelters flattened. Hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians who once found refuge in hospitals are now on the run again — as medical facilities across the enclave are crushed by bombardment or besieged.

Further south, in Rafah, some civilians are rushing northwards ahead of an anticipated Israeli ground offensive. Several Palestinians told CNN there is no peace to be found among the rubble.

“I call on all authorities and the world to look at my son and have mercy on him,” the elder Al-Zarik pleaded. “The young man is only 22 years old … He just started his life.”

Read more about the situation in northern Gaza.

After US President Joe Biden projected optimism that a hostage-for-ceasefire deal in Gaza could be reached by the end of this week, officials from Israel, Hamas and Qatar have distanced themselves from his comments.

While meetings are taking place, there are disagreements over “numbers, ratios and troop movements,” Majed Al-Ansari, a Qatar foreign ministry spokesperson said Tuesday, without elaborating. He is likely referring to the number of hostages released for Palestinian prisoners and the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers from parts of Gaza.

Earlier this week, CNN reported Hamas had backed off some key demands in the negotiations for a deal and pause in the fighting in Gaza, bringing the negotiating parties closer to an initial agreement that could halt the fighting and see a group of Israeli hostages released, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

Reuters and Al Jazeera reported that Hamas was reviewing a draft proposal for an initial ceasefire lasting roughly six weeks, during which 40 Israeli hostages would be exchanged for 400 Palestinian prisoners.

The Israeli official confirmed to CNN on Tuesday that the hope was for about 40 hostages to be freed in the initial stage of the deal, and that Israel was insisting that women soldiers were included in the group.

How a truce might look: Teams from the US, Egypt, Israel, and Qatar met in Paris on Friday and in Qatar on Monday.

Those involved in the discussions said an agreement would likely be implemented in multiple phases. Once an initial deal is made it could lead to a truce lasting as long as six weeks, with a group of Israeli hostages released including women, children, the elderly and sick in exchange for a smaller number of Palestinian prisoners than Hamas had initially demanded.

During a truce, negotiations would take place over more sensitive topics such as the release of male Israeli soldiers who are hostages, Palestinian prisoners serving longer sentences, the withdrawal of IDF forces, and bringing a permanent end to the war alongside the so-called “day after” issues.

Israeli journalist and film director Yuval Abraham said he is receiving death threats and has canceled his flight home from the Berlin International Film Festival amid backlash to an acceptance speech in which he decried the “situation of apartheid” and called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Abraham and his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra accepted the Best Documentary award for their film “No Other Land,” which chronicles evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank by Israeli authorities, on Saturday.

Their speeches were met with accusations of antisemitism by high-level German and Israeli officials, including the mayor of Berlin and Israel’s Ambassador to Germany.

Read the full story.