Israel-Gaza war live: Netanyahu says pointless to discuss ‘day after’ until Hamas is destroyed following Blinken call for plan | Israel-Gaza war
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Netanyahu says pointless to discuss ‘day after’ until Hamas is destroyed following Blinken call for ‘concrete plan’
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have delivered a rebuke to US secretary of state Antony Blinken about Israel’s plans for the future of Gaza.
Reuters reported that Blinken said on Wednesday that Israel needs “a clear and concrete plan for the future of Gaza,” adding that “we can’t have a vacuum in Gaza that’s likely to be filled by chaos.”
Blinken also said that “at the very time Israel was taking important steps to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, Israel’s limited operation in Rafah has had negative impact,” and that “restoring operational capacity of the Rafah Crossing into Gaza is an urgent problem.”
However, Netanyahu has just said that it is pointless to “talk about the day after while Hamas is still intact.”
“Contrary to what has been said, we have been engaged for months in various attempts to bring about a solution to this complex problem,” he said. “ Some of the attempts are hidden and that’s good. This is part of the war goals we defined and that we are determined to achieve.”
“In any case, there is no substitute for military victory,” he continued. There is only one substitute for victory – defeat. My government will not agree to this.”
Earlier Netanyahu’s office said his government unanimously rejected a UN general assembly decision to promote the recognition of a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu also repeated his claim that there is not a humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza. He said “The humanitarian catastrophe that was talked about hasn’t materialised, nor will it materialise.”
In its latest update on Monday, the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs reported:
About 20 per cent of Gaza’s population have been displaced again in the past week. Fuel shortages are threatening the continuity of health services and limited access to Wash facilities (water, sanitation, health care waste management) continues to drive a rise in infectious diseases. Recent evacuation orders and intensified military activity in Rafah have forced a reversal in the scale-up of nutrition services while the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition continues to increase.
Earlier the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has said it faces “significant disruptions” to its humanitarian operations due to Israel’s ground operations in Rafah. It said “the closure of the Rafah crossing and a blockade on entry of humanitarian workers and aid, including fuel, [is] critically hindering our ability to deliver essential services and aid to those in desperate need.”
Key events
Some images have come through from the Zeitoun neighbourhood in Gaza. Earlier Israel’s military announced it had pulled out some troops from the area.
Turkish foreign minister Hakan Fidan told his US counterpart Antony Blinken in a call on Wednesday that Israel’s attack on the Gazan city of Rafah is unacceptable, a Turkish diplomatic source has told Reuters.
Fidan also told Blinken that it was important to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza as soon as possible, while emphasising that obstacles to the access of humanitarian aid into the territory must be removed, the source told the news agency.
Emanuel Fabian, military correspondent for the Times of Israel, reports that the Lebanese branch of Hamas has claimed a barrage of rockets fired at western Galilee inside Israel.
Netanyahu says pointless to discuss ‘day after’ until Hamas is destroyed following Blinken call for ‘concrete plan’
Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have delivered a rebuke to US secretary of state Antony Blinken about Israel’s plans for the future of Gaza.
Reuters reported that Blinken said on Wednesday that Israel needs “a clear and concrete plan for the future of Gaza,” adding that “we can’t have a vacuum in Gaza that’s likely to be filled by chaos.”
Blinken also said that “at the very time Israel was taking important steps to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, Israel’s limited operation in Rafah has had negative impact,” and that “restoring operational capacity of the Rafah Crossing into Gaza is an urgent problem.”
However, Netanyahu has just said that it is pointless to “talk about the day after while Hamas is still intact.”
“Contrary to what has been said, we have been engaged for months in various attempts to bring about a solution to this complex problem,” he said. “ Some of the attempts are hidden and that’s good. This is part of the war goals we defined and that we are determined to achieve.”
“In any case, there is no substitute for military victory,” he continued. There is only one substitute for victory – defeat. My government will not agree to this.”
Earlier Netanyahu’s office said his government unanimously rejected a UN general assembly decision to promote the recognition of a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu also repeated his claim that there is not a humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza. He said “The humanitarian catastrophe that was talked about hasn’t materialised, nor will it materialise.”
In its latest update on Monday, the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs reported:
About 20 per cent of Gaza’s population have been displaced again in the past week. Fuel shortages are threatening the continuity of health services and limited access to Wash facilities (water, sanitation, health care waste management) continues to drive a rise in infectious diseases. Recent evacuation orders and intensified military activity in Rafah have forced a reversal in the scale-up of nutrition services while the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition continues to increase.
Earlier the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has said it faces “significant disruptions” to its humanitarian operations due to Israel’s ground operations in Rafah. It said “the closure of the Rafah crossing and a blockade on entry of humanitarian workers and aid, including fuel, [is] critically hindering our ability to deliver essential services and aid to those in desperate need.”
Palestinian officials said Israeli troops killed a man on Wednesday as clashes broke out after a West Bank march commemorating the mass displacement of Palestinians in the Nakba of 1948.
“A young man was killed by occupation bullets at the northern entrance of the city of al-Bireh,” an Israeli checkpoint at the outskirts of Ramallah, AFP reports the Palestinian health ministry said.
The official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the man killed was 20-year-old Ayser Muhammad Safi, a student at Birzeit University, reporting that he was shot in the neck during a confrontation between a group of young men and Israeli forces.
Witnesses on site told AFP they had seen a group of male students from Birzeit University gather a short distance from the Al-Bireh entrance, where they were preparing to begin protesting when Israeli troops moved in.
After the confrontation, AFP saw the body of a young man, his head in bloody bandages and his body wrapped in a blue sheet, being carried from a Ramallah hospital to the nearby morgue, as dozens of people crowded around.
At least 499 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the Israeli-occupied territory since 7 October, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah.
The Israeli army did not immediately respond to a request from AFP for comment.
Unrwa, the Palestinian refugee agency, has said video released which Israel said showed armed men at one of its facilities was most likely taken in a warehouse the agency had been forced to abandon after Israel issued evacuation orders.
An Unrwa spokesperson said the agency could not verify the authenticity or content of the video nor the exact timing or location, but it was likely that the video showed an Unrwa warehouse in Rafah that staff left in the week of 6 May.
She said flour and some U.N marked vehicles were left in the facility when it was abandoned following Israeli evacuation orders issued prior to the seizure by Israeli forces of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing into Egypt.
“Unrwa condemns the use of UN facilities by any party to the conflict for military/fighting purposes,” Unrwa spokesperson Juliette Touma said in a statement, calling on all parties to respect the neutrality of UN installations.
“Under no circumstances should anyone have or use weapons in a UN facility,” Reuters reports she said.
An IDF statement has said that on Saturday Israeli troops had identified fighters in the central logistics compound east of Rafah. Israel has repeatedly criticised Unrwa and accused a number of its staff of participating in the 7 October Hamas attack inside southern Israel.
Hamas rejected the suggestion that the men were fighters as “false allegations and lies”. “This is a police force tasked with securing aid centers against acts of theft and looting,” senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim attack on US destroyer and commercial vessel in the Red Sea
Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Wednesday claimed targeting a US Navy destroyer and a commercial ship in the Red Sea, but there was no immediate confirmation that any attacks took place.
Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said the rebels targeted the USS Mason with missiles and launched an attack on a ship he identified as the Destiny. AP reports. Multiple vessels have that name in shipping registries.
The US Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Mason, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has been in the Red Sea and the wider region as part of a US-led coalition trying to prevent Houthi attacks on shipping.
The Houthis say their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are aimed at pressuring Israel to end its war against Hamas in Gaza, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians there, according to local health officials. The war began after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking some 250 others hostage.
The Houthis have launched more than 50 attacks on shipping, seized one vessel and sunk another since November, according to the US Maritime Administration. Shipping through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has declined because of the threat.
Sunak accused of acting as ‘a bystander’ to the ‘horror’ of deaths of Palestinians in Gaza
The British prime minister has been accused of acting as “a bystander” to the “horror” of deaths of Palestinians in Gaza.
Labour MP Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) told the Commons:
In Gaza, Israel has attacked hospitals, it’s attacked refugee camps, and it has killed aid workers. Israel has blocked vital aid, turned off water supplies and denied access to food.
“Israel have killed thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, as the world watches, trampling all over international humanitarian law. No other country would be allowed to act with such impunity.
“So can the Prime Minister tell me why he allows Israel to get away with it unchallenged? And why he continues to act as a bystander to such horror?”
Rishi Sunak replied:
I do support Israel’s right to defend itself and remove the threat that Hamas, the terrorist organisation, poses to its people. But I am also deeply concerned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and I’ve consistently made that point at this despatch box, and to Prime Minister Netanyahu, we must see further action to ensure more aid gets to people who desperately need it.
“The Rafah and the Kerem Shalom crossing must be open to allow more aid in, we’re doing everything we can, trebling our investment, trying to get aid in by land, air and sea and currently working with allies to build a temporary pier.”
Here are the latest images coming across the wires from Gaza:
Israel needs a clear and concrete plan for the future of Gaza where it faces the potential for a power vacuum that could become filled by chaos, US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.
Israel’s limited operation in Rafah has had a “negative impact” just as it was taking steps to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, Blinken said during a press conference in Kyiv.
Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to present a highly contested bill that seeks to conscript ultra-Orthodox Jews into the military to a ministerial committee on Thursday.
The prime minister’s office said on Wednesday that Netanyahu sought to bridge societal and political divisions and that he was calling on all parties that had supported the proposed law in the previous parliament to back it once more.
The issue is especially sensitive this year amid an open-ended war in Gaza and related fighting on other fronts that have exacted the worst Israeli casualties – mostly among secular teenaged draftees and reservists – in decades.
Netanyahu’s coalition includes two ultra-Orthodox parties that regard the exemptions as key to keeping their constituents in religious seminaries and away from a melting-pot military that might test their conservative values.
The issue has prompted protests by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who make up 13% of Israel’s 10 million population – a figure expected to reach 19% by 2035. Their refusal to serve in wars they generally support is a long festering schism in Israeli society.
Economists argue that the conscription waiver keeps some of the ultra-Orthodox community unnecessarily out of the workforce, spelling a growing welfare burden for largely secular, middle-class taxpayers.
Israel’s 21% Arab minority is also largely exempted from the draft, under which men and women are generally called up at the age of 18, with men serving 32 months and women 24 months.
The European Union has urged Israel to end its operation in Rafah immediately as the operation disrupts the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza and is leading to more internal displacement, famine and suffering, EU chief diplomat Josep Borrell said on Wednesday.
“The EU is calling on Israel to refrain from further exacerbating the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and reopen the crossing point of Rafah. Should Israel continue its military operation in Rafah, it would inevitably put a heavy strain on the EU’s relationship with Israel,” Borrell said in a statement posted on X.
Borrell also said that under International Humanitarian Law, Israel must allow and facilitate unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief for civilians, citing International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders.
He added that, in this regard, the EU also condemns the attack by Hamas on the Kerem Shalom crossing, which has further obstructed the delivery of humanitarian relief.
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