Hamas says no talks over prisoner swaps until after Israeli military operation in Gaza ends
From CNN's Eyad Kourdi, Lauren Izso, Amy Cassidy and Sugam Pokharel
A picture taken from southern Israel, on the border with Gaza, shows Israeli tanks returning from northern Gaza on December 16. (Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP/Getty Images)
Hamas won't agree to any talks about prisoner swaps until after Israel ends its military operation in Gaza, the group said Thursday.
“There is a Palestinian national decision that there should be no talks about prisoners or exchange deals except after a full cessation of aggression,” Hamas said in a statement, claiming to speak on behalf of all Palestinians.
This comes as the head of Hamas’ political bureau Ismail Haniyeh arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for talks with Egyptian officials.
His visit came after Israel said it had proposed a weeklong pause in fighting in exchange for the release of 40 hostages, a similar deal to the one last month that brought a temporary truce.
While Israel and Hamas are negotiating another release of hostages, they are not “near a final deal at the moment,” an Israeli official told CNN on Wednesday.
Israel is currently asking for all remaining hostages to be released as part of any deal, while a temporary ceasefire as part of the deal could last for a week or two weeks, the official said.
8:35 a.m. ET, December 21, 2023
"No functional hospitals left" in northern Gaza, WHO says
From CNN's Niamh Kennedy
Displaced Palestinians gather in the yard of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza on December 10. (AFP/Getty Images)
Northern Gaza no longer has a functioning hospital, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday, detailing "unbearable" scenes teams observed during a recent mission.
"There are actually no functional hospitals left in the north," Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told a press briefing.
According to Peeperkorn, the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza was Al-Ahli Hospital but fuel, power, medical supply and staffing shortages have rendered it "minimally functional."
"Now Al-Ahli is a shell of a hospital... It completely stopped functioning and is only operating as hospice currently with no to very little care."
Only nine of the 36 hospitals in Gaza are now functioning, Peeperkorn said, adding that all nine are located in southern Gaza.
The WHO representative spoke to journalists in the wake of WHO missions carried out in recent days to Al-Ahli and Al-Shifa Hospital, a hospital located in Gaza City.
Sean Casey, who led the missions to the two hospitals, recounted the "unbearable" scenes WHO workers witnessed at a church in the Al-Ahli compound which had been converted into a makeshift ward.
"A church with 30 or so patients, almost none of them ambulatory. So bedridden patients, some of them with serious trauma wounds... We saw many patients who had said they hadn't bathed or changed their clothes in weeks," Casey recounted.
"Patients were crying out in pain but they were also crying out for us to give them water. It's pretty unbearable to see somebody with you know, casts on multiple limbs, external fixators on multiple limbs who are just asking for drinking water."
Casey said describing Al-Ahli as a hospice implied a "level of care" that the five doctors and five nurses working there are "simply unable to provide" in light of the virtually non-existent resources.
He said Al-Ahli is rather now a "place where people are waiting to die" unless they can be moved to a "safer location" capable of providing care.
The remaining medical staff at Al-Ahli are junior doctors who are unable to perform surgery, Casey said, adding that the WHO is now working to try and transfer these patients to a facility in southern Gaza.
He also provided an update on the Al-Shifa Hospital, describing its emergency department as a "bloodbath."
"It's got so few staff, almost the same number as Al-Ahli Hospital caring for hundreds of patients. And the hospital grounds are sheltering thousands of internally displaced persons."
Casey highlighted the need to get more fuel supplies into Al-Shifa, saying that it requires 10,000 liters of fuel a day - a figure he called a "huge uplift of fuel."
"We need urgent action. We need to stop these children and women and elderly people from dying in a place where they should be safe and where they should be cared for," Casey stressed in his concluding remarks.
7:28 a.m. ET, December 21, 2023
Nova Music Festival survivor reunited with her rescuer
From CNN's Will Ripley
A woman who survived the October 7th Hamas attack on the Nova Music Festival returned to the site of that massacre and reunited with the man who saved her life.
Watch Will Ripley's report below.
7:20 a.m. ET, December 21, 2023
US intelligence analysis warns Hamas’ influence has grown since its attack on Israel
From CNN's Katie Bo Lillis
Rockets are fired toward Israel from the enclave of Gaza on October 7. (Fatima Shbair/AP)
A flurry of new analysis by US intelligence agencies has warned that Hamas’ credibility and influence has grown dramatically in the two months since the October 7 terror attack and the onset of Israel’s military response in the Middle East and beyond.
As Israel’s relentless air campaign has killed thousands of civilians inside Gaza, Hamas – which is designated as a terrorist group by the United States and Europe – has been able to cast itself as the lone armed group fighting back against a brutal oppressor killing women and children.
Officials familiar with the different assessments say the group has successfully positioned itself across some parts of the Arab and Muslim world as a defender of the Palestinian cause and an effective fighter against Israel.
Hamas’ growing influence comes in the wake of its ghastly October attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 men, women and children. The US has staunchly defended Israel’s right to defend itself in the wake of the attack, including its campaign to eliminate Hamas entirely.
From Hamas’ perspective, the October 7 attack on southern Israel was a stunning operational success.
Meanwhile, Hamas propaganda videos casting the group as highly moral fighters who follow the teachings of Islam – despite the horrific details of the October 7 attack and the descriptions of sexual violence against Israeli women reported by eyewitnesses from that day – coupled with a flood of devastating images of civilian suffering inside Gaza, have gone viral on Arab social media.
Survey: With no political solution in sight to end siege, Palestinians support Hamas decision to fight Israel
From CNN's Andrew Carey and Abeer Salman in Ramallah, West Bank
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) has just published the findings of its latest survey into Palestinian attitudes.
Seven hundred and fifty adults were interviewed face to face in the West Bank, and 481 were interviewed in Gaza, also in person. The Gaza data collection was done during the recent truce, when it was safer for researchers to move about.
The survey has a four-point margin of error (rather than the usual three-point).
It found that almost three-quarters (72%) of all respondents believe Hamas’s decision to launch its attack on Israel on October 7 was “correct.” Less than a quarter (22%) said it was “incorrect.”
“Palestinians believe that diplomacy and negotiations are not an option available to them, that only violence and armed struggle is the means to end the siege and blockade over Gaza, and in general to end the Israeli occupation,” Shikaki said. But that doesn’t mean support for atrocities, he adds. “No one should see this as support for any atrocities that might have been committed by Hamas on that day.”
This important distinction is teased out by three of the poll’s data points. Almost 80% of respondents told PCPSR researchers that killing women and children in their homes is a war crime.
An even higher number (85%) of respondents said they had not watched videos shown by international news outlets of acts committed by Hamas on October 7 – a figure which may hint at why only 10% of those surveyed said they believed Hamas had committed war crimes that day.
Polling in a war zone comes with difficulties even in the lulls. Interviewing people in the center and south of the enclave was relatively straightforward as most were still at home, but surveying people from the north of Gaza was partially compromised because so many had been displaced to shelters.
Dozens of journalists killed since October 7, advocacy group says
From CNN’s Kareem El Damanhoury
A relative bids farewell during the funerals of Palestine TV journalist Mohammad Abu Hattab and his 11 family members the day after they were killed in Khan Younis, Gaza on November 3. Abed Zagout/Anadolu/Getty Images
At least 68 journalists have been killed in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon since the outbreak of war on October 7, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Wednesday.
The casualties include 61 Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese, according to CPJ’s data, marking what it said was the deadliest period for journalists since it began gathering data in 1992
Earlier this week, a United Nations agency said Gaza has become the most dangerous place in the world for journalists and their families.
12:20 a.m. ET, December 21, 2023
Israeli military dog captured hostages' voices on camera days before they were killed by friendly fire
From CNN's Tamar Michaelis, Sugam Pokharel and Andrew Carey
The voices of three Israeli hostages who were accidentally killed by Israeli troops in Gaza were captured on a GoPro camera mounted on a military dog five days before they were shot, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Wednesday.
The video, located by the IDF on Tuesday, shows the recording took place during a military exchange between Israeli forces and Hamas militants at a site where the hostages were being held, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari told a daily news briefing. The dog was killed in the exchange.
“You can hear voices, and when we analyzed the clip, we understood that in the audio we can hear the three hostages, fully vocally identified,” Hagari said.
He did not provide details about what the three hostages — Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz and Samer Talalka — could be heard saying.
The militants who held the three men were killed during the fighting, which appears to have allowed the captives to flee, Hagari said, citing an initial IDF analysis of the GoPro video.
Israel is reeling from the IDF’s admission that it killed the hostages on Friday. The three men had been taken captured by Hamas during the group’s October 7 terror attack.
Asked when Israel should move to a less intensive phase of its war with Hamas, Biden pointed to the negotiations at the UN as a reason not to give a firm answer.
"We’re negotiating right now at the UN the contours of a resolution...a resolution that we may be able to agree to," he told reporters Wednesday. "That's still going on. I'll be happy to talk to you after that."
Multiple UN agencies are backing calls for a stop in fighting as they warn of the dire humanitarian situation in the strip. It comes after the wider UN General Assembly voted last week to demand an immediate ceasefire, in a rebuke to the US, which has repeatedly blocked ceasefire calls in the Security Council.
Biden's comments Wednesday suggest US support remains an unresolved matter inside the White House.
Here are the latest headlines:
More UN warnings: The head of the United Nations' health agency on Thursday warned of the “toxic mix of disease, hunger and lack of hygiene and sanitation” faced by people in Gaza as he called for an immediate ceasefire. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said intense fighting is impeding efforts to provide life-saving aid to people and called for "conditions to allow for large-scale humanitarian operations" to be "reestablished immediately."
US push: The conflict between Israel and Hamas “needs to move to a lower intensity phase,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday. Blinken’s comments echo what Biden administration officials have told Israel privately, CNN previously reported, which is that the US wants Israel to shift to a lower-intensity phase of the war in the next several weeks. Meanwhile, Blinken also called out other countries for not demanding Hamas surrender.
Hostages latest: Hamas' political chief is in Egypt for talks on the war. The visit comes after Israel proposed a pause in fighting in exchange for the release of about 40 hostages, although an Israeli official said they were not near a deal yet.
On the ground: Videos published Wednesday show heavy airstrikes in the Jabalya area of northern Gaza, where the Hamas-controlled health ministry said at least 46 people were killed. Also, several videos from the Rafah area of southern Gaza show a series of powerful explosions. Journalists on the ground said the blasts were caused by Israeli airstrikes and that several people were killed. The videos, which have been geolocated by CNN, show extensive damage to what appears to be a residential building.
Tunnel videos: The Israeli military on Wednesday released videos it says show a network of tunnels in Gaza City. The army said it uncovered the network after securing operational control over a plaza in the city center. The videos purport to show a series of tunnel shafts and access points leading underground.
Border exchanges: One man was killed by Israeli fire, Lebanon’s National News Agency said, following fresh exchanges between the Israeli military and Hezbollah militants across the Lebanon-Israel border. Hezbollah said it targeted Israeli military helicopters with surface-to-air missiles and launched attacks on several other locations along the border. The Israeli military said artillery and tanks struck several locations in Lebanon in response to incoming fire.
10:51 p.m. ET, December 20, 2023
Gaza residents face "toxic" combination of disease, hunger and lack of hygiene, WHO chief warns
From CNN’s Akanksha Sharma
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a press briefing at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva on December 15. Lian Yi/Xinhua/Getty Images
The head of the United Nations' health agency on Thursday warned of the “toxic mix of disease, hunger and lack of hygiene and sanitation” faced by people in Gaza as he called for an immediate ceasefire in Israel's war with Hamas.
"Hunger weakens the body’s defenses and opens the door to disease," World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
"Gaza is already experiencing soaring rates of infectious disease outbreaks. Diarrhoea cases among children aged under 5 are 25 times what they were before the conflict," he said. "Such illnesses can be lethal for malnourished children, more so in the absence of functioning health services. We need a ceasefire now."
Tedros' comments come amid multiple calls from UN agencies for a pause in fighting to help relief efforts in Gaza.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned Thursday that intense fighting is impeding efforts to assist people in Gaza. He called for “conditions to allow for large-scale humanitarian operations” to be "reestablished immediately.”
On Wednesday, the World Food Programme said half of Gaza's population is starving and residents are often going entire days without eating. Meanwhile, UNICEF warned Tuesday that children and families “are not safe in hospitals” in Gaza as the enclave’s wider health care system teeters on the edge of collapse.
Last week, the wider UN General Assembly voted to demand an immediate ceasefire, in a rebuke to the US, which has repeatedly blocked ceasefire calls in the Security Council.
