March 29, 2024 - Israel-Hamas war

The Israel Defense Forces admitted to killing two Palestinian men and burying their bodies with a bulldozer after Al Jazeera published a video purportedly showing the incident Wednesday. 

In a statement, the IDF claimed that the men approached its “operational area” in central Gaza “in a suspicious manner” and didn’t respond to a warning shot. The IDF said it killed them and bulldozed their bodies fearing they carried explosives.

Here are other headlines you should know:

Israel has claimed that a United Nations-backed report on famine in northern Gaza was inaccurate and accused Hamas of controlling the aid. 

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an initiative controlled by UN bodies and major relief agencies, reported last week that 2.2 million people in Gaza do not have enough food to eat. It said that half of the population is on the brink of starvation and famine projected to arrive in the north “anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”

Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the agency that controls access to Gaza said Friday, “The report contains multiple factual and methodological flaws.”

COGAT claimed in a statement that there are information gaps in the IPC report which “diminished the reliability of the data” because it’s difficult to conduct surveys and samplings in Gaza while the war is ongoing.

The statement also said the report contains “inaccuracies” because it relies on data provided by local bodies such as Gaza’s Ministry of Health, “which has a strategic interest in presenting a fundamentally misleading information.”

Humanitarian crisis: As of earlier this month, more than two dozen people, including children and babies, have died from starvation and dehydration in the north, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. People have resorted to scavenging, eating grass and animal feed, and drinking polluted water. Starving mothers are unable to produce enough milk to feed their babies and parents beg for infant formula at overwhelmed health facilities, parents and doctors told CNN.

High-level talks between US and Israeli officials over potential military operations in Rafah could take place in Washington, DC, as soon as Monday, US officials tell CNN. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly called off talks scheduled for this week after the United States refused to block a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of captives held by Hamas. 

The Israeli delegation proposed to reschedule the talks for Monday, officials said, acknowledging the timing is complicated by a March 31 deadline facing the Israeli government to design a new law governing conscription for ultra-Orthodox Jews, long exempted from mandatory military service. 

Netanyahu has requested that Israeli’s top court defer the deadline to draft a new plan, and it remains unclear whether the delegation would be authorized to travel to the United States if those plans are in flux. 

US officials have said no date is finalized. 

The White House has said it supports the rescheduling of the talks and is working with its counterparts to do so in a timely manner. 

The Civil Defense in Gaza said its teams recovered eight bodies from the wreckage of a civilian vehicle after an airstrike Friday.

At least five children were killed, according to Al-Ahli Hospital where the bodies and others who were injured were brought.

The media office of the Hamas-run government said a local police officer was killed along with his family when their vehicle was struck near al-Shuja’ya neighborhood. Several bystanders were also killed in the attack on a crowded key road in Gaza, the media office added. 

The deceased police officer was identified as Ahmed El-Batsh, according to a man who told CNN he was El-Batsh’s cousin.

Dr. Mostafa Saidam, a survivor of the strike, said the scene was “like judgment day.”

Software developer Amr Siadam recalled an “unbelievably terrifying” night.

“Your imagination can never match the reality of it,” he said. “You wake up unable to see anything and hear all the screams, calls for help, searching for your wife, son, mother. It’s unbelievably terrifying.”

The Hamas-run government said another Israeli airstrike in the same neighborhood killed at least 10 people, including police officers tasked with securing humanitarian aid. 

CNN has reached out to the IDF for comment.

A screen grab from a video obtained by Al Jazeera shows a man walking along a beach in Gaza before being killed by IDF forces.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has admitted killing two Palestinian men and burying their bodies with a bulldozer after Al Jazeera published a video purportedly showing the incident Wednesday. 

The men approached its “operational area” in central Gaza “in a suspicious manner” and didn’t respond to a warning shot, the IDF said in a statement to CNN. The Israelis killed them and bulldozed their bodies fearing they carried explosives, it said.

What the video shows: In the video, which is filmed from a distance and has been heavily edited, two men are seen walking along a beach in Gaza, apart from one another; both appear to be waving white flags, to symbolize surrender, as they cautiously approach a group of Israeli soldiers. The video shows one man walking toward the soldiers with his hands in the air. He passes out of view behind some sand and concrete. It’s not clear what happens to him next. The second man turns away from the soldiers. As he hurriedly walks away from the camera, he is seen being followed by an Israeli armored vehicle. Suddenly, he falls to the sand, apparently shot. 

The video then cuts to another angle, which CNN geolocated after getting a tip from X user FDov21 at Geoconfirmed, an OSINT-led geolocating platform, to an area on the Al Rasheed roadway next to the beach, where an Israeli military bulldozer is seen unceremoniously burying two bodies in sand and debris. It’s not clear whether the bodies shown in the second half of the film are the two men who were filmed at the start of the sequence. Al Jazeera claims the bodies are the same men.

Al Jazeera said in its commentary that the “giant bulldozer shovels the two bodies and buries them in sand and litter. The Israeli soldiers attempt to conceal the executions.”

CNN has asked Al Jazeera for an unedited copy of the footage. Al Jazeera said the incident happened near Al Rasheed Street in central Gaza. CNN geolocated the video and confirmed it showed the incident at the beach. Additional visual evidence – satellite imagery and videos – shows Israeli military engineering vehicles such as bulldozers were deployed there.

What Israel said: The edited video “represents two different incidents,” the IDF said.

“The first incident occurred in the southern part of the corridor. After the suspect did not respond to a warning shot, the (force) fired to his direction and he was shot and slightly wounded,” the IDF said, adding he was released after receiving medical treatment and questioning. 

The second incident occurred in the northern part of the corridor and the two suspects were fired at after approaching Israeli forces “in a suspicious manner,” the IDF said.

This post has been updated after CNN geolocated the second location.

A series of Israeli airstrikes targeting areas close to the Syrian city of Aleppo on Friday have led to casualties among both civilians and military personnel, according to the Syrian state news agency SANA.

Thirty-eight people were killed, according to Reuters, including five members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah. One of the Hezbollah fighters was a local field commander whose brother was killed in an Israeli strike on southern Lebanon in November, Reuters said. This makes the strikes some of the deadliest since Israel intensified its military campaign against Iran-backed groups in Syria and others last year.

Israeli warplanes initiated an attack around 1:45 a.m, local time from the direction of Athriya, southeast of Aleppo, according to a military source quoted by SANA.

The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the attack.

Israel has previously launched attacks on Aleppo and the Syrian capital Damascus, including before the October 7 war, saying it feared that Iran would turn Syria into “a base for aggression” against the Jewish state.

Remember: Both Syria and Israel consider each other enemies and do not share diplomatic relations.

Israel will conduct its military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria and anywhere else they find the militant group, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a post on X Friday.

The Israel Defense Forces said that Ali Abed Akhsan Naim, allegedly the deputy commander of Hezbollah’s Rocket and Missile Unit, had been killed in an airstrike in the area of Bazouriye in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah and Israel have been engaging in deadly cross-border strikes the last few months, which has displaced tens of thousands of Lebanese and Israeli residents from their homes. 

A Palestinian boy dressed in light blue pajamas cries out for his mother. Doctors in Kamal Adwan Hospital, in northern Gaza, tenderly douse his face in lotion, but he is still whimpering in pain.

CNN video from the hospital in Gaza City on March 21 shows Mosaab Al-Homss’ swollen eyelids and deep red scabs that cover his whole body. The little boy, age 2-and-a-half, sustained severe burns after an Israeli strike on his grandfather’s home in the Abu Iskander area, west of Jabalya, on March 18, according to health officials at the hospital. At least 80 Palestinians were sheltering in the residential building when it was struck, the health officials said, adding that five members of the Al-Homss family were killed — all of whom were children. Mosaab’s mother was severely injured, hospital officials said.

Dr. Ayesh Hossam Abu Warda, a neurosurgeon caring for survivors of the strike in the Kamal Adwan Hospital, said they sustained multiple injuries in the upper and lower limbs.

Health workers treating wounded Palestinians in Gaza previously told CNN the vast majority of patient arrivals include children with traumatic burns, missing limbs and shrapnel injuries to the chest and abdomen.

Responding to CNN’s questions about the attack on the Al-Homms’ family home in northern Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces said it is “operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.”

CNN’s Benjamin Brown contributed reporting to this post.

Pro-Palestinian supporters attend a demonstration in Dublin, Ireland, in October 2023. 

Ireland has become the latest nation to say it will intervene in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in a reflection of the country’s longstanding position of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Ireland announced this week it would file its intervention, adding to growing international pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to dial back its devastating assault on Gaza and end severe restrictions on food aid pushing Palestinians toward famine.

The case was brought to the ICJ by South Africa, and in an initial ruling in January, the court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza, but stopped short of accusing it of genocide. According to reports, Ireland is expected to include in its intervention the argument that Israel’s blocking of food aid to Gaza could be considered an act of genocide.

In a speech on Wednesday, Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said that both the Hamas October 7 attack in Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza “represents the blatant violation of international law on a mass scale.”

Zoë Lawlor, who leads the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), said there has been “deep empathy and sympathy in Ireland with Palestinian people.” That solidarity is largely born out of a shared experience of subjugation by an occupying state. The island nation was under English and then British rule for more than 800 years, after Anglo-Norman invaders seized huge stretches of land from the native Irish in the 12th Century.

Read more about how Ireland’s position on the Israel-Hamas conflict has made it an outlier among European governments.

The Israel Defense Forces told CNN that 20 rockets and two anti-tank missiles were fired from Lebanon toward Israel on Friday.

The IDF said the two anti-tank missile launches were identified as coming from Ayta ash Shab in southern Lebanon. The IDF said it struck the launcher and what it alleged was a Hezbollah military compound adjacent to the launcher.

The IDF also says it struck other Hezbollah targets, including what it described as “military compounds and terrorist infrastructure,” in the area of Chebaa in southern Lebanon.

Earlier on Friday, the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon announced it had launched attacks in retaliation to what it claimed were Israeli attacks on Damascus and Aleppo.