Welcome to The Australian’s rolling coverage of Israel’s conflict with Hamas.
Fight for Khan Younis puts Israel on collision course with US
The southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis is a critical target for Israel’s military—strategically and symbolically. The centuries-old market town is the suspected hiding place of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and the militant group’s most significant remaining military stronghold.
But the fight to capture it risks putting Israel on a collision course with the Biden administration, which has called on Israel to minimise civilian casualties and ease humanitarian deprivation in Gaza, and to hew to a more limited war aim of expelling Hamas from power.
Khan Younis, a city of 400,000 people in normal times, almost doubled in size as Gazans fled there from the bombed-out remains of Gaza City. That makes it a treacherous battlefield as Israel fights militants in the midst of crowded neighborhoods.
Winning control of southern Gaza’s biggest city would allow Israeli troops to surround Hamas’s remaining fighters and effectively remove the U.S.-designated terrorist group from power in the Gaza Strip.
Israel would need to decide whether to keep waging conventional war against remaining Hamas forces with the airstrikes, ground forces and artillery that have impaired the militants’ fighting power but also caused civilian casualties. Or it could begin to shift to limited special-forces operations to target remaining Hamas cells, a potentially yearslong fight that would have U.S. support but also require a long-term presence that could be criticized as occupation.
In Israel last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told officials in Israel’s war cabinet that the Biden administration believed the conflict should end in weeks, not months, said U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions. Israeli officials made no guarantees but expressed their interest in a return to normal, particularly so that the country doesn’t take a hit economically, the officials said.
“We all recognize the longer this war goes on, the harder it gets for everybody,” said a US official.
The US and Israel have also used different rhetoric about war aims, with the US focusing on ending Hamas’s reign in power and some Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, talking about eradicating the militant group—something Washington sees as impossible.
Looming over all of it is a sense that domestic political pressure on President Biden, who is heading into an election year, has put a time limit on such active American support for the Israeli war effort. Biden’s support for Israel has hurt him with left-leaning Democrats, polls show, as images of dead children and other innocent civilians proliferate across news pages and social media.
Dow Jones
New crossing ‘set to open for aid to Gaza’
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths has said he saw promising signs Thursday that the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel into the Gaza Strip might be opened soon to allow aid in.
The checkpoint was responsible for 60 percent of goods getting into the besieged Palestinian territory before October 7 and the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Griffiths said that in recent days there had been signs that key countries — notably Gaza’s neighbours Israel and Egypt — have become much more open to the idea of gradually reopening Kerem Shalom.
“We’re still negotiating, and with some promising signs at the moment, access through Kerem Shalom… that that may be able to open soon,” Griffiths told a press conference in Geneva.
An Israeli siege has seen only limited supplies of food, water, fuel and medicines enter Gaza, triggering dire shortages.
Currently only the Rafah border crossing with Egypt is open for any aid to flow into Gaza.
“We have been arguing for the opening of Kerem Shalom, not just as an opening to allow trucks to go there, to then go through Rafah and then up into Gaza — but to go straight through Kerem Shalom up into the northern parts of Gaza, or wherever the need is greatest,” Griffiths said.
“If we get that — it will be the first miracle we’ve seen for some weeks — but it will be a huge boost to the logistical process… it would change the nature of humanitarian access.”
AFP
Body cam footage shows Hamas fighters inside building
The Israeli Defence Forces have released a video from a Hamas fighter’s body cam which shows militants armed with RPGs and Kalashnikovs setting up anti-tank missile positions inside a building.
The video shows three militants setting up position before they are killed by a drone.
“The squad was attacked by a remote manned aircraft of the Air Force, under the direction of the brigade’s fire intelligence information and the fighters on the ground,” said IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari.
The IDF said the video cam was found on the body of one of the fighters.
Public order breaking down in south Gaza
Public order is breaking down in southern Gaza as Israel’s military offensive dislodges Hamas’s control of the enclave, preventing aid deliveries to Palestinians who are reporting cases of starvation and disease.
In a sign of the growing desperation for tens of thousands of displaced civilians, people in Khan Younis — a southern city that has doubled in size since residents fled there from bombed-out Gaza City — broke into the United Nations’ warehouse and took food supplies, which left the U.N. with nothing to distribute there Thursday.
The UN said Thursday that its operations were near collapse and it was unable to send aid beyond the strip’s southernmost city of Rafah, and only patchy delivery to Khan Younis. The UN said that Israeli military restrictions have made it impossible to distribute aid in Gaza anywhere beyond the small area along the Egyptian border.
The rapid deterioration of basic living standards adds to a humanitarian crisis that will be the subject of a United Nations Security Council meeting Friday, putting pressure on Israel to end the war before its war aims are achieved. It also illustrates how Hamas — which ruled Gaza’s streets with a strict authoritarianism for 16 years — was losing control over all but a few pockets of territory.
Dow Jones
Wong to visit Israel, Middle East
Foreign Minister Penny Wong will visit Israel within weeks as part of a wider Middle East trip to urge regional leaders to chart an end to the war in Gaza.
Assistant Foreign Minister Tim Watts will lay the groundwork for the trip, announcing on Thursday he would travel to Israel, Qatar and Egypt next week. “Arrangements are being made for the Foreign Minister to visit the Middle East early in the new year,” Senator Wong’s spokeswoman told The Australian. “Australia has been working with countries that have influence in the region to help protect and support civilians, to help prevent the conflict from spreading and to reinforce the need for the just and enduring peace that all of us want.”
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham is also due to visit Israel next week, leading a bipartisan delegation that will include the Victorian Labor MPs Josh Burns and Michelle Ananda-Rajah, the LNP’s Andrew Wallace and Victorian Liberal MP Zoe McKenzie.
Senator Wong will seek to meet key counterparts in Israel, the West Bank and countries with influence in the wider region.
Read the full story.
Israeli minister’s son killed in fighting
The son of a member of Israel’s war cabinet has been killed in fighting with Hamas.
Gal Meir Eisenkot, 25, a reserve soldier, was killed alongside another reservist, Jonathan David Deitch, 34.
Gal Eisenkot, is the son of former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, a member of Benny Gantz’s opposition National Unity party, which has joined Israel’s emergency government.
Mr Eisenkot received the news while touring the IDF’s Southern Command alongside Mr Gantz.
Mr Gantz posted his condolences Mr Eisenkot and his family on X, saying Israel was committed to continue fighting for the cause for which Gal had died.
Link to twitter post: https://twitter.com/gantzbe/status/1732797199916912818
“Gadi, we’ve known each other for years,” he said. “I know how strong you are and how united your family is. You’ve always protected our home as well as your personal home. I’m sure that this will remain. You will look after your family and you will all keep each other strong.”
Extraordinary pictures emerge of Hamas prisoners
Extraordinary video and pictures have emerged of scores of Palestinian prisoners who Israel media is reporting to be Hamas militants.
In one picture, published across Israeli media, the men, stripped to their underwear, appear to be seated in the desert guarded by Israeli Defence Forces troops. In another, they line two streets in the city of Jabaliya.
In a third, they are seen being driven away in an army truck.
Israeli forces regularly strip their captives to ensure they are not carrying concealed weapons or explosives.
Channel 12, which published the photographs and video, said they were of the capture of “apparently” Hamas members in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Describing the capture as a “round up” of militants, Channel 12 reported that some of those photographed had surrendered to the Israeli military.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari told reporters: “Jabaliya and Shejaiya are ‘centres of gravity’… for terrorists, and we are fighting them. They are hiding underground and come out and we fight them. Whoever is left in those areas, they come out from tunnel shafts, and some from buildings, and we investigate who is linked to Hamas, and who isn’t. We arrest them all and interrogate them.”
Palestinian photographer Abdul Hakim Abu Rayash, told The Washington Post that among those detained is journalist Diaa al-Kahlout, the Gaza bureau chief of Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed newspaper.