Israel faces growing tensions between the war cabinet and the far-right coalition government as Egypt presents a ceasefire proposal. Meanwhile, Israeli forces kill at least three Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Casualties:
- 21,507 killed* and at least 55,915 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
- 316 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
*This figure is the latest confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health as of December 29. Due to breakdowns in communication networks within the Gaza Strip, the Ministry of Health in Gaza has been unable to regularly and accurately update its tolls since mid-November. Some rights groups put the death toll number closer to 30,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.
Key Developments
- Deadly airstrikes pummel several areas across Gaza, killing 187 people in 24 hours.
- Fighting continues to rage on between Israeli ground troops and Palestinian armed groups, as Israeli army announces an expansion of operations in Khan Younis.
- U.N. says hunger in Gaza has passed “catastrophic threshold,” as UNRWA estimates 40 percent of the population is at risk of famine while aid barely trickles in.
- Health and human rights groups denounce Israel’s continued targeting of Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia amid systematic attacks on the health care system in Gaza.
- Palestinians who were detained in northern Gaza report threats, violence, and humiliation at the hands of Israeli forces.
- Hamas delegation heads to Cairo on Friday to discuss Egyptian proposal for ceasefire, reiterates call for complete cessation of Israeli aggression in Gaza, and for Palestinians to determine the shape of their own political future.
- Israeli leadership torn between war cabinet and far-right elements of coalition government, who refuse to consider possibility of Palestinian Authority involvement in Gaza.
- Leaked Israeli High Court draft ruling indicates one of most contested clauses of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul could be struck down, reigniting internal Israeli disputes.
- Thousands of demonstrators call for release of hostages in Jerusalem i culmination of five days of protests, Israeli army releases probe into killing of three Israeli hostages by own soldiers.
- Israel continues to shell southern Lebanon and Syria, armed groups in neighboring countries respond.
- U.S. forces intercept Yemeni drone and missile in Red Sea.
- Israeli forces shoot and kill a Palestinian man allegedly responsible for stabbing attack at checkpoint near Jerusalem on Thursday, raids home and detains relatives.
- Palestinian killed by Israeli forces in southern occupied West Bank on Friday following alleged car-ramming attack.
- Israeli forces detain more than 15 Palestinians during violent overnight raids, as U.N. raises the alarm about the rising violence in the occupied West Bank.
- Peace Now warns Israel is expanding illegal settlements in northern and southern West Bank “in the shadow of war.”
- Hundreds of protesters in Times Square hold mock funeral procession on Thursday to denounce killing of thousands of Palestinian children by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Looking ahead to 2024 have decided to make some predictions about what’s to come in 2024 to the Palestine-Israel war; The Israel-Hamas war won’t expand to a (full) second front.One of the biggest fears in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war is that Hamas’s better-equipped, more battle-hardened ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, will fully dive into the war against Israel. We predict that even as Israel and Hezbollah trade limited pot shots on the northern border, this won’t happen, thanks in part to the deterrent effect of the ongoing U.S. aircraft carrier presence in the Mediterranean, and all the overwhelming firepower that comes with it, which will make Hezbollah and its backers in Iran hold off from diving headfirst into the fight.
The long history of Zionist proposals to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip. Ethnic cleansing or “transfer” is an intrinsic part of Zionism’s early history, and has remained an essential feature of Israeli political life. More recently, “transfer” has been mainstreamed by billing it as encouraging “voluntary emigration.”
| This Jewish Scholar Believes Diaspora Jews Must Embrace Exile to Save Judaism Shaul Magid was once a settler in Gaza. Today he’s a Jewish Studies professor who defines his worldview as “counter-Zionism.” His stance imagines an Israel that respects all peoples’ histories and abandons Zionism as a “Jews only” ideology. The Growth of Israeli Settlement in The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)“So, it was Palestinian terrorism and militancy that forced Israel to illegally send Jewish settlers into the West Bank, by the thousands, year after year after year, thereby making a viable and contiguous Palestinian state impossible?” @mehdirhasan Benjamin Netanyahu announced his endgame in Gaza:Israel announces its Gaza endgame: Ethnic cleansing as ‘humanitarianism.’The “voluntary migration” of Palestinians forced to choose between leaving or dying by bombardment and starvation. His goal is to end the Palestinians as a people and as a national movement. With the Israeli government recently stating that, according to its own calculations, over 65% of deaths from Israeli military operations in Gaza were civilians, time and investigations will tell whether any of that military conduct violated the Geneva Conventions. Another question, however, demands critical attention as well: Whether Israel is promoting an interpretation of international humanitarian law that undermines the Conventions’ values and subverts their rules. That might explain some of the outcomes we are seeing on the ground.The Israeli government keeps invoking the need to respond to Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7 to avoid discussing the legal duty to avoid disproportionate harm to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The two are legally distinct. Disproportionate attacks are war crimes. A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza Mosab Abu Taha has written about life in Gaza for the New Yorker since outbreak of the war. In a new essay, the poet chronicles his experience of being deatined and beaten by Israeli forces while trying to escape with his family. President Biden held a difficult & frustrating phone call last weekend with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and asked that Israel release withheld Palestinian tax revenues. President Biden held a difficult conversation last weekend with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s decision to withhold part of the tax revenue it collects for the Palestinian Authority, according to two U.S. and Israeli officials and a source with knowledge of the issue. A U.S. official said this part of last Saturday’s call between the two leaders was one of the most difficult and “frustrating” conversations Biden has had with Netanyahu since the beginning of the war in Gaza. It’s a sign of the growing tensions between Biden and Netanyahu. Palestinian advocates seeking genocide ruling dismiss Biden’s response, cite Reagan precedent. After Israel, during a 10-week attack on Lebanon, bombed neighborhoods in Beirut in 1982 and killed numerous civilians, Reagan telephoned Prime Minister Menachem Begin, expressed “outrage” and threatened to withdraw a U.S. mediator. The call “resulted in a cease-fire within 30 minutes,” lawyers for Palestinian-rights supporters told a federal judge in a filing Friday night opposing the Biden administration’s request to dismiss the suit. |
| It wants to eradicate Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that launched a bloody attack on Israel on Oct. 7. At the same time, Egyptian officials worked with Qatar to advance a multiphased proposal to end the war—a plan that neither Hamas nor Israel is likely to accept in its current form. Meanwhile, the Israel-Hamas war is jeopardizing the prospects for peace in Yemen.A society that sanctifies indiscriminate death and killing loses its moral superiority and the justification for its existence. This is the second massive blow that Hamas is on the way to landing on us | Opinion | Uri Misgav |
“The damage to American interests has already been profound, even setting aside the reputational costs of running interference for war crimes in one place while opposing them elsewhere.
The peoples of Israel and Palestine are held hostage by poor, extreme, and self-interested leadership, leading them eagerly into death’s embrace. The result is predictable. As former U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace wrote, Netanyahu’s methods will “fuel the conflict for another 50 years.” The Israeli prime minister is unrepentant. On Christmas Eve, he said, “We are intensifying the war in the Gaza Strip.”
Washington can and should be empathetic and sympathetic with how Israel arrived at this moment, but it ought not continue to sustain one of the greatest human disasters of the 21st century. This calamity is not in America’s interests, nor does it even serve the interests of the Israeli people. And it only guarantees misery, starvation, and death for the people of the Gaza Strip.
An Israeli airstrike on a Gaza refugee camp in October killed the target, a Hamas commander. But it also cost scores of civilian lives. Why did it happen?