Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to expand the Gaza operation, saying the war “isn’t close to finished,” and would take a long time, AP and Reuters report.
Netanyahu dismissed what he cast as false media speculation that his government might call a halt to fighting against the Palestinian enclave’s Hamas Islamists.
“We are not stopping. We are continuing to fight, and we will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, and the fighting will take long and it is not close to concluding,” he told lawmakers from his Likud party, according to a statement.
It’s approaching 1.40am in Gaza City and Tel Aviv and this blog will close shortly. Our live coverage will resume later today. Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
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Medics said an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed 23 people, bringing total Palestinian fatalities overnight on Sunday to more than 100. At least 70 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting Maghazi in central Gaza, a spokesperson for the Hamas-run health ministry said. Associated Press reported later that at least 106 were killed in the airstrike on the Maghazi refugee camp. Eight people were killed as Israeli planes and tanks carried out dozens of airstrikes on houses and roads in al-Bureij and al-Nuseirat, health officials said.
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Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad have rejected an Egyptian plan proposing that they give up power in the Gaza Strip in return for a permanent ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources told Reuters. Both groups, which have been holding separate talks with Egyptian mediators in Cairo, rejected offering any concessions beyond the possible release of more of the hostages seized on 7 October.
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Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) says Israel “will pay” for killing one of its commanders, Iranian state TV reports. The Tasnim news agency and Reuters said earlier that an airstrike killed Sayyed Razi Mousavi outside Syria’s capital, Damascus. He was an IRGC member responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran. The IRGC described Mousavi as a brigadier general who was one of their oldest advisers in Syria. The Israeli military declined to comment on the reports.
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Israeli strikes have killed 20,674 people and injured 54,536 in Gaza since 7 October, the territory’s health ministry said. It said on Monday that 250 Palestinians had been killed and 500 injured over the past 24 hours.
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The Israeli prime minister has vowed to expand the Gaza operation, saying the war “isn’t close to finished” and will take a long time. Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed what he cast as false media speculation that his government might call a halt to fighting against Hamas. “We are not stopping. We are continuing to fight, and we will be intensifying the fighting in the coming days, and the fighting will take long and it is not close to concluding,” he told legislators from his Likud party, according to a statement. Separately, Netanyahu told Israel’s parliament that Israel would not succeed in freeing the remaining hostages held in Gaza without military pressure.
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Family members of hostages taken by Hamas interrupted Netanyahu during a special session of parliament, CNN reported. They shouted “there is no time” and “now, now, now” while holding posters and signs with the names and photos of their relatives. The prime minister said he would “shake every tree and turn every stone to bring back all the kidnapped”.
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The World Health Organisation said it led missions to barely functioning hospitals in northern Gaza at the weekend, describing growing desperation and starving people stripping an aid vehicle of supplies. The UN health agency and its partners delivered aid, including fuel, to the al-Shifa hospital, once Gaza’s biggest and most advanced medical facility, the WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said late on Sunday on X (formerly Twitter). The mission on 23 December witnessed “rising desperation due to acute hunger”, he said.
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Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, has accused the UN of “hypocrisy” and ordered his ministry not to extend one UN employee’s entry visa and to refuse entry for another.
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Pope Francis said in his Christmas message that Israeli strikes in Gaza were reaping an “appalling harvest” of innocent civilians and that was pleading for an end to the military operations. The pontiff called “for a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by an opening to the provision of humanitarian aid” as he spoke to thousands of people gathered at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
Many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have followed Israeli army evacuation orders and sought safety in designated areas only to find there is little space left in the densely populated enclave, a U.N. humanitarian team leader said on Monday.
Gemma Connell, deployed in Gaza for several weeks, described what she called a “human chess board” in which thousands of people, displaced many times already, are on the run again and there is no guarantee a destination will be safe.
“People were heading up south with mattresses and all of their belongings in vans and in trucks and in cars in order to try and find somewhere safe,” said Connell, who on Monday visited the Deir al-Balah neighborhood in central Gaza.
“I’ve spoken to many people. There’s so little space left here in Rafah that people just don’t know where they will go and it really feels like people being moved around a human chessboard because there’s an evacuation order somewhere.
“People flee that area into another area. But they’re not safe there,” Connell, team leader for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told Reuters.
Asked for the army’s response, a spokesperson said the military has sought to evacuate civilians from areas of fighting but Hamas systematically attempts to prevent that effort.
The army spokesperson said the Palestinian militant group uses civilians as human shields, an accusation the group denies.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid has said the country is “not doing enough” to bring the hostages taken by Hamas back, The Times of Israel reports.
Lapid said the hostages needed to be brought back home “now”.
He said: “We need to do everything and we will do everything to bring them back, all of them.”
On the Israeli airstrike outside Damascus that killed Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said: “I won’t comment on foreign reports, these or others in the Middle East.
“The Israeli military obviously has a job to protect the security interests of Israel.”
Family members of hostages taken by Hamas interrupted Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during a special session of parliament today, CNN reported.
They shouted “there is no time” and “now, now, now” while holding posters and signs with the names and photos of their relatives.
Netanyahu said he will “shake every tree and turn every stone to bring back all the kidnapped”.
Iran’s ambassador in Damascus Hossein Akbari told Iranian state TV that Sayyed Razi Mousavi, a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was posted at the embassy as a diplomat and was killed by Israeli missiles after returning home from work.
Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, said the assassination of Mousavi showed “weakness” on the part of Israel.
“This act is a sign of the Zionist regime’s frustration and weakness in the region for which it will certainly pay the price,” Iranian media cited Raisi as saying.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his Christmas Day sermon to highlight the suffering of children caught up in the Israel-Hamas war.
In his sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Welby said: “Today a crying child is in a manger somewhere in the world, nobody willing or able to help his parents or her parents who so desperately need shelter.
“Or perhaps lying in an incubator, in a hospital low on electricity, like the Anglican al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, surrounded by suffering and death.
“Maybe the newborn lies in a house that still bears the marks of the horrors of 7 October, with family members killed, and a mother who counted her life as lost.
“Or maybe they’re not a newborn, but someone thinking of next term, having again to hide their Jewishness on their way to school in this country, or a playgroup in our own cities fearful of the age-old atrocious sin of antisemitism.”
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say Israel “will pay” for killing one of its commanders, Iranian state TV reports
Reuters and Tasnim news agency said earlier that an airstrike killed Sayyed Razi Mousavi outside Syria’s capital, Damascus.
“Undoubtedly, the usurper and savage Zionist regime will pay for this crime,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) said in a statement read on Iranian state TV.
Mousavi was an IRGC member responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran.
The IRGC described him as one of their oldest advisers in Syria, holding the rank of brigadier-general.
Iran’s state television reported that Mousavi had been “among those accompanying Qassem Soleimani”, the head of the Guards’ elite Quds Force, who had been killed in 2020 in a US drone attack in Iraq.
Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad have rejected an Egyptian proposal that they relinquish power in the Gaza Strip in return for a permanent ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources told Reuters.
Izzat al-Rishq, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, later denied in a statement what the sources said about the talks, adding: “There can be no negotiations without a complete stop to the aggression.”
Referring to the more than 20,000 Palestinians killed during the 11-week war with Israel, he said: “The Hamas leadership is aiming with all its might for a complete, not temporary, end to the aggression and massacres of our people.”
The Egyptian sources had said that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have been holding separate talks with Egyptian mediators in Cairo, had rejected offering any concessions beyond the possible release of more of the hostages seized on 7 October when militants entered southern Israel, killing 1,200 people.
Iran’s state television announced that Sayyed Razi Mousavi had been killed, describing him as one of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ oldest advisers in Syria, Reuters reports.
It said he had been “among those accompanying Qassem Soleimani”, the head of the Guards’ elite Quds Force who had been killed in 2020, in a US drone attack in Iraq.
Three security sources told Reuters that an Israeli airstrike outside Damascus on Monday killed Mousavi.
There was no immediate comment from Israel’s military. The reports have not yet been independently verified by the Guardian.
An Israeli airstrike outside Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Monday killed a senior adviser in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, three security sources have told Reuters.
The adviser, known by his nickname Sayyed Razi Mousavi, was responsible for coordinating the military alliance between Syria and Iran, the sources said.
The reported death has not yet been independently verified by the Guardian.
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Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad have rejected an Egyptian plan proposing that they give up power in the Gaza Strip in return for a permanent ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources told Reuters. Both groups, which have been holding separate talks with Egyptian mediators in Cairo, rejected offering any concessions beyond the possible release of more of the hostages seized on 7 October.
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20,674 people have been killed and 54,536 injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October, Gaza’s health ministry said. The ministry said that 250 Palestinians had been killed and 500 injured in the past 24 hours.
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Medics said that an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed 23 people, bringing total Palestinian fatalities overnight to more than 100, Reuters reported. At least 70 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting Maghazi in central Gaza, the health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra, said earlier. The Associated Press reported later on Monday that at least 106 Palestinians were killed in the airstrike on the Maghazi refugee camp on Sunday night. Eight people were killed as Israeli planes and tanks carried out dozens of air strikes on houses and roads in al-Bureij and al-Nuseirat, health officials said.
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Pope Francis reportedly said in his Christmas message that Israeli strikes in Gaza were reaping an “appalling harvest” of innocent civilians. “I plead for an end to the military operations with their appalling harvest of innocent civilian victims, and call for a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by an opening to the provision of humanitarian aid,” he said as he spoke to thousands of people gathered at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says that Israel will not succeed in freeing the remaining hostages held in Gaza without military pressure, Reuters reports.
“We wouldn’t have succeeded up until now to release more than 100 hostages without military pressure,” Netanyahu said during a speech in Israel’s parliament. “And we won’t succeed at releasing all the hostages without military pressure.”
More than 100 hostages are still believed to be held in Gaza.
Qatar and Egypt were mediators between Israel and Hamas in the late November truce during which Hamas released 110 women, children and foreigners it was holding in exchange for 240 Palestinian women and teenagers freed from Israeli jails.
Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad have rejected an Egyptian plan proposing that they give up power in the Gaza Strip in return for a permanent ceasefire, two Egyptian security sources have told Reuters.
Both groups, which have been holding separate talks with Egyptian mediators in Cairo, rejected offering any concessions beyond the possible release of more of the hostages seized on 7 October when militants entered southern Israel, killing 1,200 people.
Egypt proposed a “vision”, also backed by Qatari mediators, that would involve a ceasefire in exchange for the release of more hostages, and lead to a broader agreement involving a permanent ceasefire along with an overhaul of leadership in Gaza, which is currently led by Hamas.
A Hamas official told Reuters: “Hamas seeks to end the Israeli aggression against our people, the massacres and genocide, and we discussed with our Egyptian brothers the ways to do that.
“We also said that the aid for our people must keep going and must increase and it must reach all the population in the north and the south.
“After the aggression is stopped and the aid increased we are ready to discuss prisoner swaps.”
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