Third stage of war to take ‘at least six months’ – official
Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,140 people and seized up to another 250 as hostages, Israeli officials have said they planned to wage the war in three stages.
The first was intense shelling to clear access routes for ground forces and encourage civilians to evacuate; the second was the invasion that began on 27 October.
The official, who spoke earlier, told Reuters that the military was now pivoting to the third stage as Israeli tanks and soldiers have now overrun much of the Gaza Strip.
“This will take six months at least, and involve intense mopping-up missions against the terrorists. No one is talking about doves of peace being flown from Shajaia,” the official said, referring to a Gaza district devastated by fighting.
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Numerous West Bank attacks were carried out by a large group of Israeli settlers and the violence spiked after Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, Yesh Din, a human rights group, said.
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“At least 10 Palestinians were killed by settlers and dozens of homes and vehicles were set on fire” last year, Yesh Din, which began monitoring settler violence against Palestinians in 2006, said.
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“2023 was the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity.”
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The West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1967 six-day war, with about 490,000 settlers now living among approximately three million Palestinians, in settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
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Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,140 people and seized up to another 250 as hostages, Israeli officials have said they planned to wage the war in three stages.
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The first was intense shelling to clear access routes for ground forces and encourage civilians to evacuate; the second was the invasion that began on 27 October.
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The official, who spoke earlier, told Reuters that the military was now pivoting to the third stage as Israeli tanks and soldiers have now overrun much of the Gaza Strip.
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“This will take six months at least, and involve intense mopping-up missions against the terrorists. No one is talking about doves of peace being flown from Shajaia,” the official said, referring to a Gaza district devastated by fighting.
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Israel is withdrawing some troops from Gaza to shift to more targeted operations against Hamas, an Israeli official has said.
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The official said the withdrawal was focused on reservists – of which Israel drafted 300,000 for the war – and designed to “re-energise the Israeli economy”.
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But the official told Reuters that some of the troops pulled out of Gaza in the south would be prepared for rotation to the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah militants have been exchanging fire with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians.
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Israel has warned that if Hezbollah does not back down a full-on Lebanon war looms.
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Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, whose militant allies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen have also been carrying out longer-range attacks against Israel.
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“The situation on the Lebanese front will not be allowed to continue. This coming six-month period is a critical moment,” the official said.
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It’s 10:01am in Gaza and Tel Aviv, here is a summary of the latest:
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In a press briefing on New Year’s Eve, Israel Defence Forces spokesperson Rear Adm Daniel Hagari indicated that the conflict could go on through 2024, saying that “The objectives of the war require prolonged fighting,” and that management of the defence forces “are designed to ensure planning and preparation for the continuation of 2024… understanding that we will be required for additional tasks and warfare throughout this year.”
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Just after midnight on New Year’s Day, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets, setting off air raid sirens in southern and central Israel. No injuries were reported. The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack in a video published on social media, saying they had fired M90 rockets in “response to the massacres of civilians” carried out by Israel.
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At least 100 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours, as the three-month-old conflict between Israel and Hamas rolls into the new year.
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Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for the return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip after the war and said Gaza’s Palestinian population should be encouraged to emigrate, according to AFP. “To have security, we must control the territory,” Smotrich told Israel’s Army Radio in response to a question about the prospect of re-establishing settlements in Gaza. “In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” The Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu has not officially suggested plans to evict Gazans or to send Jewish settlers back to the territory since the war broke out on 7 October.
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US Navy helicopters sank three of four small boats used by Iranian-backed Houthi militants to attack a merchant vessel in the southern Red Sea on Sunday, US central command said. The Houthis have targeted vessels in the vital Red Sea shipping lane with strikes they say are in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
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A former member of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet has offered a rare public apology, Associated Press reports. The news agency says Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, appeared to accept responsibility for the polarised atmosphere ahead of the 7 October attack. “I’m here sitting and telling you, the democratic, secular public: I sinned against you, I caused pain for you, I caused you to fear for your lives here, and I am sorry for this,” she told Channel 13 TV.
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World Health Organization representatives visited Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis on Sunday to assess the needs of the overwhelmed health facility, WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said. In a tweet on Sunday, Tedros added that the Nasser Medical Complex is one of only two key functioning hospitals in southern Gaza that is able to provide medical care for wounded and other patients.
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Cori Bush, a US Democratic senator representing Missouri, has joined a handful of Democrats in criticizing the Joe Biden’s administration for bypassing congressional review in its transfer of weapons to Israel. Over the weekend, Bush tweeted: “The White House cannot have it both ways: calling on the Israeli government to uphold international law while bypassing Congress to send weapons that are leading to violations of international law. How many innocent people must die before @POTUS will demand a ceasefire?”
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Palestine’s ambassador to the UK said that the world wants to discuss the “day after Israel’s aggression on Gaza but it’s the day before we need to understand”. In an interview with Democracy Now, Husam Zomlot said: “Everybody now is wanting us to discuss the day after. No. The day before. The day before 7 October. The occupation, the colonisation, the racism, the supremacy, the murders all over the West Bank, the provocations in Jerusalem, the rounding and arresting of our children without trial, without charge, without access to their parents or lawyers, this is what needs to be discussed.”
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The Palestinian foreign minister has released a statement before the new year in which he condemned what he called the “Israeli war machine’s persistence in the war of genocide”. In a statement on X, Riad Malki wrote: “We welcome the new year and the 59th anniversary of the start of the Palestinian revolution, yet the wounds of our people are bleeding due to Israeli war machine’s persistence in the war of genocide, destruction, and displacement.”
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Approximately 1.4 million Palestinians who have been displaced by Israeli strikes are living in UNRWA facilities across the Gaza Strip, the UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said. She told the BBC: “The facilities in the north are becoming crowded by the hour, people continue to come in. They are absolutely full and so people have started taking refuge in areas outside these facilities including in parks, in the open. Many are sleeping in their cars.”
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More than 21,800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 56,000 wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.
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It’s 8:13am in Gaza and Tel Aviv on New Year’s Day, welcome to our latest blog on the Israel-Gaza war. My name is Reged Ahmad and I’ll be with you for the next while.
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In a press briefing on New Year’s Eve, Israel Defence Forces Rear Adm Daniel Hagari has indicated that the conflict could go on through 2024, saying that “The objectives of the war require prolonged fighting,” and that management of the defence forces “are designed to ensure planning and preparation for the continuation of 2024… understanding that we will be required for additional tasks and warfare throughout this year.”
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More on that in a moment but first, here’s a summary of the latest:
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Just after midnight on New Year’s Day, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets, setting off air raid sirens in southern and central Israel. No injuries were reported.
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At least 100 people have been killed in Gaza in the past 24 hours, as the three-month-old conflict between Israel and Hamas rolls into the new year.
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Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for the return of Jewish settlers to the Gaza Strip after the war and said Gaza’s Palestinian population should be encouraged to emigrate, according to AFP. “To have security, we must control the territory,” Smotrich told Israel’s Army Radio in response to a question about the prospect of re-establishing settlements in Gaza. “In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” The Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu has not officially suggested plans to evict Gazans or to send Jewish settlers back to the territory since the war broke out on 7 October.
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US Navy helicopters sank three of four small boats used by Iranian-backed Houthi militants to attack a merchant vessel in the southern Red Sea on Sunday, US central command said. The Houthis have targeted vessels in the vital Red Sea shipping lane with strikes they say are in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
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A former member of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet has offered a rare public apology, Associated Press reports. The news agency says Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, appeared to accept responsibility for the polarised atmosphere ahead of the 7 October attack. “I’m here sitting and telling you, the democratic, secular public: I sinned against you, I caused pain for you, I caused you to fear for your lives here, and I am sorry for this,” she told Channel 13 TV.
-
World Health Organization representatives visited Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis on Sunday to assess the needs of the overwhelmed health facility, WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said. In a tweet on Sunday, Tedros added that the Nasser Medical Complex is one of only two key functioning hospitals in southern Gaza that is able to provide medical care for wounded and other patients.
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Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the war would continue for “many more months” and that Israel would assume control of the Gaza side of the border with Egypt. He made the comments at a news conference Saturday.
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Cori Bush, a US Democratic senator representing Missouri, has joined a handful of Democrats in criticizing the Joe Biden’s administration for bypassing congressional review in its transfer of weapons to Israel. Over the weekend, Bush tweeted: “The White House cannot have it both ways: calling on the Israeli government to uphold international law while bypassing Congress to send weapons that are leading to violations of international law. How many innocent people must die before @POTUS will demand a ceasefire?”
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Palestine’s ambassador to the UK said that the world wants to discuss the “day after Israel’s aggression on Gaza but it’s the day before we need to understand”. In an interview with Democracy Now, Husam Zomlot said: “Everybody now is wanting us to discuss the day after. No. The day before. The day before 7 October. The occupation, the colonisation, the racism, the supremacy, the murders all over the West Bank, the provocations in Jerusalem, the rounding and arresting of our children without trial, without charge, without access to their parents or lawyers, this is what needs to be discussed.”
-
The Palestinian foreign minister has released a statement before the new year in which he condemned what he called the “Israeli war machine’s persistence in the war of genocide”. In a statement on X, Riad Malki wrote: “We welcome the new year and the 59th anniversary of the start of the Palestinian revolution, yet the wounds of our people are bleeding due to Israeli war machine’s persistence in the war of genocide, destruction, and displacement.”
-
Approximately 1.4 million Palestinians who have been displaced by Israeli strikes are living in UNRWA facilities across the Gaza Strip, the UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said. She told the BBC: “The facilities in the north are becoming crowded by the hour, people continue to come in. They are absolutely full and so people have started taking refuge in areas outside these facilities including in parks, in the open. Many are sleeping in their cars.”
-
More than 21,800 Palestinians have been killed and more than 56,000 wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The ministry does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths.
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Key events
Watchdog says 2023 was worst year for Israeli settler violence
Israeli settlers killed at least 10 Palestinians and set alight dozens of homes in the occupied West Bank in 2023, making it the “most violent” year on record for settler attacks, an Israeli watchdog has said.
Numerous West Bank attacks were carried out by a large group of Israeli settlers and the violence spiked after Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel, Yesh Din, a human rights group, said.
“At least 10 Palestinians were killed by settlers and dozens of homes and vehicles were set on fire” last year, Yesh Din, which began monitoring settler violence against Palestinians in 2006, said.
“2023 was the most violent year in settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank in both the number of incidents and their severity.”
The West Bank has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1967 six-day war, with about 490,000 settlers now living among approximately three million Palestinians, in settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
Iran’s foreign ministry has called on the UN security council to take action after an Israeli airstrike in a Damascus neighbourhood was reported to have killed a high-ranking Iranian general in December.
“Through Iran’s representative office, we communicated with the UN secretary-general [António Guterres] and called on the security council to commit to its duty of maintaining international peace and preventing regional peace from being compromised,” spokesperson Nasser Kanani was quoted by Al Jazeera as saying in his weekly news conference.
Kanani described the killing of Razi Mousavi as a “blatant violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and said both countries have the right to respond, Al Jazeera reports.
Iran’s Alborz warship has passed through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and entered the Red Sea, the country’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Monday.
Iranian warships have been operating in the region “to secure shipping lanes since 2009”, Tasnim said, according to Reuters.
The Houthis, who are aligned with Iran, have targeted vessels in the vital Red Sea shipping lane with strikes they say are in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Several shipping lines have suspended operations through the Red Sea in response to the attacks, instead taking the longer journey around Africa.
The Yemeni rebels have said they are targeting Israel and Israeli-linked vessels.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan district in Gaza City, in the northern part of the strip that Israel’s offensive focused on first, said tanks had withdrawn after what they described as the most intense 10 days of warfare since the conflict began.
Tanks also pulled out of Gaza City’s al-Mina district and parts of Tel al-Hawa district, while retaining some positions in the suburb controlling the enclave’s main coastal road, according to residents.
However, tanks remained in other parts of northern Gaza, Reuters reports.
Fighting in central parts of the territory continued on Monday, residents there said, with tanks pushing into al-Bureij and airstrikes targeting al-Nusseirat, al-Maghazi and the southern city of Khan Younis.
Israel’s military chief, Herzi Halevi, has been speaking to troops.
He was quoted by Reuters as saying:
From the first moments of this war, we said it would take long.
Will we ultimately be able to say there are no more foes around the state of Israel?
I think that is overly ambitious. But we will deliver a different security situation – safe and, as much as possible, stable too.
Israel has listed 174 soldiers – many of them reservists – as having been killed in fighting in Gaza and nine on the Lebanese border.
Thousands of doses of vaccines against childhood diseases including polio and measles have begun entering the Gaza Strip to help deal with a growing health emergency there, the Palestinian health ministry has said.
Israel’s ground offensive has effectively stopped normal health services in Gaza, including vaccinations against highly contagious childhood diseases that had been brought under control by mass immunisation programmes.
The ministry said supplies, estimated to be sufficient to cover vaccinations for between eight and 14 months, had entered Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt with the aid of Egyptian government cold storage facilities, Reuters reports.
Yasser Bouzia, head of international relations in the health ministry in Ramallah, said there were estimated to be about 60,000 newborn babies in Gaza, who would normally receive vaccination but who have been largely cut off from medical services.
He said administering the vaccines would be difficult because most of Gaza’s population had been driven from their homes, with hundreds of thousands living in tents or other temporary accommodation.
The vaccines against diseases including rubella, polio, measles and mumps come from supplies bought by the Palestinian health ministry and also donated by Unicef, the UN children’s fund, the ministry said.
In Khan Younis, where Israel is believed to have thousands of troops, residents have reported airstrikes and shelling in the west and centre of the city, according to the Associated Press.
The military and the militant group Islamic Jihad reported clashes in the area.
Third stage of war to take ‘at least six months’ – official
Since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,140 people and seized up to another 250 as hostages, Israeli officials have said they planned to wage the war in three stages.
The first was intense shelling to clear access routes for ground forces and encourage civilians to evacuate; the second was the invasion that began on 27 October.
The official, who spoke earlier, told Reuters that the military was now pivoting to the third stage as Israeli tanks and soldiers have now overrun much of the Gaza Strip.
“This will take six months at least, and involve intense mopping-up missions against the terrorists. No one is talking about doves of peace being flown from Shajaia,” the official said, referring to a Gaza district devastated by fighting.
Israel to withdraw some troops from Gaza to shift to more targeted operations – official
Israel is withdrawing some troops from Gaza to shift to more targeted operations against Hamas, an Israeli official has said.
The official said the withdrawal was focused on reservists – of which Israel drafted 300,000 for the war – and designed to “re-energise the Israeli economy”.
But the official told Reuters that some of the troops pulled out of Gaza in the south would be prepared for rotation to the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah militants have been exchanging fire with Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians.
Israel has warned that if Hezbollah does not back down a full-on Lebanon war looms.
Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran, whose militant allies in Syria, Iraq and Yemen have also been carrying out longer-range attacks against Israel.
“The situation on the Lebanese front will not be allowed to continue. This coming six-month period is a critical moment,” the official said.
Tens of thousands of people marched in Istanbul on Monday to protest against Israel’s war in Gaza and the killing of Turkish soldiers by outlawed Kurdish militants in Iraq.
The demonstration, called by a foundation which counts Bilal Erdoğan, the son of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among its members, started after crowds performed morning prayers, Agence France-Presse reports.
Protesters waving Turkish and Palestinian flags rallied to the Galata Bridge on the Bosphorus, chanting: “Murderer Israel, get out of Palestine”, and “Allahu Akbar” (God is the greatest).