LAST UPDATE | 25 Oct 2023
ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged for the first time that he would “have to give answers” for security lapses exposed in the deadly 7 October attacks by Hamas.
“We will examine in detail, we will get to the bottom of it,” said Netanyahu, who has faced a barrage of opposition and media criticism after Gaza militants breached Israeli border defences.
“The fault will be examined and everyone will have to give answers, including me. But all this will happen later,” the right-wing leader said in a televised address as the Israeli military prepares for a widely expected invasion of the Gaza Strip.
“As prime minister I am responsible for securing the future of the country,” he added.
Israel says 1,400 people, most of whom were civilians, died in the attacks.
Gaza’s Hamas government says that Israeli air and artillery bombing since 7 October have left more than 6,500 dead, including some 2,700 children.
With tens of thousands of Israeli troops massed at the Gaza border, Netanyahu said “we are raining down hellfire” with the air strikes and that “all Hamas terrorists are dead men walking – above ground, below ground, outside Gaza”.
“We are preparing the ground offensive,” Netanyahu said.
“I cannot say when, how or how many, nor all the elements that we are taking into account, of which most are not known to the public,” he added.
Israel has an army of about 165,000 and has called up 360,000 reservists, some on the Gaza border and others moved to the border with Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement has been staging daily artillery attacks.
Israel is facing growing international pressure to rethink plans for a massive ground operation in Gaza where the Hamas-run health ministry says 700 people have been killed in 24 hours.
“A massive intervention that would put civilian lives at risk would be a mistake,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in Cairo after meeting Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who also warned a ground operation would cause “many, many civilian casualties”.
It would also “be unlikely to offer Israel long-term protection” and would be incompatible with respecting “international humanitarian law and the rules of war”, Macron said.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden said Wednesday that Israel has the right to respond to the 7 October Hamas attack but must do everything it can to protect civilians.
“Israel has to do everything in its power, as difficult as it is, to protect innocent civilians. It’s difficult,” he said.
Biden also called for an immediate end to Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
“That’s pouring gasoline on the fire,” he said. “They’re attacking Palestinians in places that they’re entitled, and… it has to stop now.”
The main UN aid agency in besieged Gaza has warned it will have to stop operations by the end of today because it is running out of fuel.
Alarm has grown about the spiralling humanitarian crisis in heavily bombarded Gaza where one doctor said he was forced to perform emergency surgery on the wounded without anaesthetic.
President Emmanuel Macron today said that France was sending a navy ship to support the Gaza Strip’s hospitals which are at risk of collapsing under Israel’s bombing.
The ship will “leave Toulon in the next 48 hours”, the French leader said during a joint news conference in Cairo with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
France will also send a planeload of medical equipment to Egypt to be transported into the war-torn Palestinian territory.
Israel has cut off impoverished Gaza’s usual water, food and other supplies, and fewer than 70 relief trucks have entered since the war started – “a drop of aid in an ocean of need”, warned UN chief Antonio Guterres.
Inside the battered Palestinian territory, Abu Ali Zaarab, whose family house in Rafah was bombed, charged angrily that “they’re not waging war on Hamas, they’re waging war on children… It’s a massacre”.
Tempers flared at the United Nations where Guterres decried the “epic suffering” in Gaza and the “collective punishment” of its 2.4 million residents, drawing a furious response from Israel.
“Mr secretary-general, in what world do you live?” replied an infuriated Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who recounted graphic accounts of civilians including young children killed in the deadliest single attack in Israeli history.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign, writing on X, formerly Twitter, that the UN chief had “expressed an understanding for terrorism and murder”.
US President Joe Biden shared the concern that the aid lifeline is “not fast enough”.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “food, water, medicine and other essential humanitarian assistance must be able to flow into Gaza” and that “humanitarian pauses must be considered for these purposes”.
Elsewhere, the Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister Riyad al-Maliki today met senior International Criminal Court officials.
Maliki’s flying visit to the world’s war crimes court in The Hague came a day after he deplored inaction by the UN Security Council to stop “massacres” in Gaza by Israel, which has retaliated for a massive attack by Hamas that largely killed civilians.
“Today, Dr Riyad al-Maliki… visited the ICC and held meetings with the President, the Prosecutor and the Registrar of the Court,” the ICC said in a statement.
The top Palestinian diplomat’s visit was not announced to the media, but in a video released by the ICC he can be seen shaking hands with the court’s president Piotr Hofmanski, chief prosecutor Karim Khan and registrar Osvaldo Zavala Giler before sitting down for a discussion.
The ICC has declined to comment on the details of Maliki’s visit.
Maliki however is set to give a statement tomorrow morning at a press conference in The Hague.
Chief prosecutor Khan’s office said earlier this month it was “continuously gathering information” in support of its probe into the Palestinian situation.
It opened a formal investigation in 2021 into the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, including alleged crimes by Israeli forces and by Hamas and Palestinian armed groups.
The prosecutor’s office “put in place a dedicated team to advance the investigation in relation to the situation in the State of Palestine, the first time a fully resourced team had been established in relation to this situation,” it said.
Set up in 2002, the ICC’s is the only global independent tribunal to probe the world’s worst crimes including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israel, which is not a member of the ICC, has refused to cooperate with the probe or recognise its jurisdiction.
On the 19th day of Israeli air and artillery strikes and a near-total land, sea and air blockade of Gaza, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA warned operations are at breaking point.
“If we do not get fuel urgently, we will be forced to halt our operations in the Gaza Strip,” said the agency which provides aid to 600,000 displaced in Gaza, where many families have slept in the open.
Israel has refused to allow fuel shipments into Gaza, fearing Hamas will use it for weapons and explosives and accusing the militant group of stockpiling supplies in large tanks.
Aid groups have warned that more people will die if medical equipment, water desalination plants and ambulances stop running in Gaza, where the only power plant went offline weeks ago.
Patients are already being treated on the floors of hospitals overwhelmed with thousands wounded by bombing. The Red Cross has warned that hospitals, once the generators stop running, “turn into morgues”.
“We performed a number of surgeries on the wounded without anaesthetic,” said Ahmad Abdul Hadi, an orthopaedic surgeon working in the emergency room of Nasser hospital, Khan Yunis.
“It’s tough and painful, but with the lack of resources, what can we do?”
Aid agencies report that shelters and emergency tent cities are heaving under the weight of an estimated 1.4 million displaced – more than half the population of the 40km long coastal strip.
Air strikes have kept hitting Gaza, where Israel says it is targeting Hamas sites, including tunnels and munitions depots, but where many residential buildings have been reduced to rubble.
The Gaza war has sparked fears of a regional conflagration if it draws in more of Israels’ enemies – especially Iran-backed groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah which has already traded deadly cross-border fire with Israel.
Israeli strikes also killed eight soldiers early today in the south of Syria, another Iran ally, state media reported, in what the Israeli army said was a response to earlier rocket fire.
Blinken told the UN Security Council that Washington “does not seek conflict with Iran” but also warned that “if Iran or its proxies attack US personnel anywhere, make no mistake, we will defend our people, we will defend our security – swiftly and decisively”.
Hezbollah leader met with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad senior representatives in Beirut today to discuss how “to achieve real victory… in Gaza and Palestine” and stop Israel’s “brutal aggression”, a statement said.
Israel has meanwhile continued to mass tens of thousands of troops outside Gaza ahead of a ground offensive that has been anticipated for more than two weeks.
Military planners acknowledge it would mean difficult urban combat in a densely populated area latticed by tunnels and would imperil remaining civilians and the hostages.
“There are a lot of obstacles,” an Israeli soldier serving with the military engineering corps told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“The enemy is spraying rockets and other things that I cannot detail to prevent us from progressing.”
So far Hamas has released four hostages after mediation involving Qatar and Egypt, including Israeli Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, who later spoke of the “hell” of her abduction.
She recalled how gunmen raided her kibbutz home, threw her over the back of a motorbike and beat her as they raced back into Gaza, recounting that “they hurt me very much”.
She and 79-year-old Nurit Cooper were released on “compelling humanitarian” grounds, according to Hamas, and Lifshitz also said the hostages were treated well once they were being held in captivity.
Both of their octogenarian husbands are still in Gaza along with more than 200 other Israeli and foreign hostages.
In the West Bank, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, the health ministry has said.
Violence had already spiralled in the West Bank before the Gaza war, with the highest death toll in the Palestinian territory since at least 2005.
Many of the Palestinian deaths came in raids by Israeli troops, but there has also been a rise in violence between Palestinians and Israeli settlers which has seen civilians as well as fighters killed on both sides.
Since October 7, killings have surged in the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, with the Palestinian death toll reaching 101 Palestinians, according to the Ramallah-based health ministry.
Over the same period, the Israeli military has reported one member of the security forces killed while taking part in a raid.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say