Hamas broke temporary truce in Gaza minutes after it began, senior IDF officer says
SALATIN, Gaza Strip — Two weeks have passed since a temporary truce between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas in the Gaza Strip began, and exactly a week since it ended.

Shortly after the terror group made clear that it was not abiding by the ceasefire agreement on December 1, the military resumed fighting in the Palestinian enclave.

But a senior officer now reveals that Hamas broke the truce much earlier, in fact just 15 minutes after it began, on November 24.

“We were here, well prepared,” said Lt. Col. (res.) Yisrael — his last name was withheld by the IDF for security concerns — the commander of the 261st Brigade’s 8717th “Alon” Battalion, to The Times of Israel and other reporters in the Palestinian town of Salatin, on the outskirts of Jabaliya, in northern Gaza.

“At 7 a.m. the ceasefire started, and at 7:15 a.m., dozens of terrorists ran toward us from every direction. Some of them opened fire and our forces killed them. Between 7:15 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., we killed 20 terrorists. And then they realized they shouldn’t mess with us, and we stopped their assault,” Yisrael said.

Noting one specific incident, he said that at around 7:15 a.m. on November 24, a Palestinian family had attempted to return to their home in the area. As the family approached their building, shots were fired at Israeli troops from an adjacent home, he said.

“The troops returned fire, I don’t know if we hit [the operative], he likely fled,” Yisrael said. “The next morning we arrived [at the building] and found his Kalashnikov [assault rifle], his uniform. It just shows their method of operating. The terrorist had arrived under the auspices of the family. They have no mercy for their own families, for their children,” he said.

Yisrael said the Hamas operatives are fighting like “cowards.”

“They don’t really try to face us, but to sting here and there. Their method of operating is fleeing in civilian clothes, leaving behind their uniform, their guns, anti-tank missiles, explosives, and they just run. After we leave the area, they return and attack the next forces,” he said.

Yisrael said the attacks on November 24 were a “cynical exploitation” of the ceasefire.

The IDF had reported other violations during the week-long truce. But the breaches within minutes of the ceasefire went unmentioned by the IDF, likely in a bid to uphold the agreement, which saw Hamas later release 105 civilian hostages, in exchange for a lull in fighting and Israel’s release of 240 Palestinian security prisoners. The ceasefire ended early on December 1 after Hamas failed to provide a new list of hostages for release that day, and fired rockets at Israel just before the 7:00 a.m. deadline.

‘In every house, there are weapons, tunnels’
“We are working hard here, every day, clearing the area. Wherever there are terrorists, we kill [them]. Wherever there is infrastructure, we take it out. We are turning every stone, clearing every house,” Yisrael said.

“There isn’t a single house here without weapons, there isn’t a house without [tunnel] infrastructure. It’s unbelievable. In dozens of yards of homes we found dozens of rocket launchers,” he said. “We found Kalashnikovs under mattresses, inside clothes closets. It wasn’t thrown there suddenly, they were hidden in the homes.”

He said Hamas’s placement of weapons and infrastructure within civilian sites was an attempt to “take advantage of the sensitivity we once had.”

“Schools, a cemetery near us, in a clinic… these are the places where they concentrated most of their tunnel shafts. They thought we wouldn’t strike there, and that’s where we found the enemy’s significant infrastructure,” Yisrael said.

He said his battalion is working to “deprive the enemy of its abilities” during its slow but thorough operations in northern Gaza.

“The enemy has nothing to return to. It has no infrastructure here to return to, it has no weapons in the homes to return to and use against us,” he said.

As we tour the area, Yisrael shows us two multiple rocket launchers, as well as a mortar launcher that the troops had found adjacent to homes. One of the rocket launchers, partially blown up by the forces, still has cables running from it to the basement of one of the homes.

There were three massive craters between the homes, as a result of Israeli Air Force strikes. The mortar launcher, aimed at the Israeli border community of Netiv Haasara, was completely intact. One of the IAF strikes had missed the launch site by about a meter, highlighting the IDF’s need for boots on the ground.

Moving to another area in Salatin, Yisrael showed us a tunnel shaft located just outside a home. It goes down 15 meters, he said. Later in the day, the tunnel was destroyed.

Asked if he was concerned that the military may be missing tunnels that could be used to attack forces when they least expect, he responded: “There are tunnels everywhere in Gaza, it takes time.”

Reservists of all ages

The 261st Brigade is made up of reservists, mostly ex-members of the Givati Infantry Brigade, as well as cadets from the Bahad 1 IDF officers’ school. The 8717th Battalion lost two soldiers during the battles in northern Gaza — Sgt. Maj. (res.) Rani Tahan and Master Sgt. (res.) Yakir Biton — and two more reservists who were killed during the October 7 onslaught — Ariel Refael Guri, and Orel Alon.

Back home, Yisrael has a wife and children waiting for him, much like the other troops in the battalion.

“It’s difficult, complex, very challenging, kids who haven’t seen their father [in two months]… but I think everyone understands that we have no choice,” Yisrael said.

As for his soldiers, Yisrael said he is aware of their difficulties too. “I won’t say it isn’t challenging, it’s very difficult, people are struggling because of their jobs, it’s complex for their families. But whoever is here for the past 63 days, whoever is here fighting, has gone through the physical pain and mental pain, and is now here due to willpower, friendships, wanting to obtain the objectives,” he said.

“Nobody is here because I told them to be,” he said, noting that around 60 of the troops are volunteering, as they are old enough to be exempt from reserve duty.

Lt. Col. (res.) Yisrael, the commander of the 261st Brigade’s 8717th “Alon” Battalion, in northern Gaza’s Salatin, close to Jabaliya, December 7, 2023. (Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
“The battalion is made up of reservists, veterans and younger soldiers. Some are close to 50, even one or two who are older than 50. We have younger soldiers who were released [from active service] a year ago,” Yisrael said. “These are people sacrificing everything for the country, the best people in the country. They left behind everything, their families, their work, to fight here.”

“I feel we are finally eliminating Hamas. We saw the horrors of October 7, my battalion saw the bodies. We are not messing around, we know exactly what we are doing here,” he said.

“Our equipment might not be as good [as the standing army units], but we have spirit, and we are here to fight, to kill the enemy, to win, and go back home,” Yisrael added.

Iran Looks to Houthi Proxies to Escalate Fight With Israel
The Iranian-backed militia in Yemen has launched drone and missile attacks on Israeli and American targets. American officials fear the group could go too far and incite a wider war.

Dec. 8, 2023, 6:12 a.m. ET

The Houthis, Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen who have launched recent drone and missile attacks on Israeli and American targets, are emerging as an unpredictable and dangerous wild card in the Middle East — the proxies that Iran considers most suited to widening the war with Israel.

Analysts close to the Iranian government said the Houthis’ base in Yemen makes them ideally positioned to escalate fighting in the region, in the hopes of pressuring Israel to end its war with Hamas in Gaza.

The analysts’ assessment tracks with descriptions of a plan by Iran and its network of militias to increase attacks on Israeli and American targets in the region, according to two Iranians affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Houthis, the analysts said, are Iran’s chosen proxies because from Yemen they are both close enough to the Red Sea’s strategic waterways to disrupt global shipping, and far enough from Israel to make retaliatory strikes difficult. Unlike Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has struck Israel from Lebanon, the Houthis are not beholden to domestic political dynamics — making them effectively accountable to no one.

Two senior Israeli defense officials said their intelligence confirmed that Iran’s leaders were pushing the regional militias to intensify their attacks against Israel. They said Israel’s defense and intelligence circles were alarmed by the recent Houthi attacks and considered the threat serious enough that military intelligence had established a special unit dedicated to threats coming from Yemen. In recent years, they said, Israeli intelligence had also predicted the next war would be fought on multiple fronts, mentioning the Houthis and other Iranian proxies.

Already, the Houthis have used their proximity to major shipping lanes to attack commercial vessels and threaten U.S. warships. A further escalation along the same routes could disrupt global shipping, analysts said.

“We think Houthis in Yemen will become more of a threat to Israel in the long term than Hamas or even Hezbollah,” said Nasser Imani, a political analyst in Tehran who is close to the government. “Iran considers them a major player and part of the collective strategy of the resistance axis.”

On Thursday, John F. Kirby, a national security spokesman for President Biden, said the Houthi attacks threatened to escalate tensions in the region: “It’s clearly a risk to the potential widening and deepening of the conflict.”

The network of Iran-backed regional militias, known as the axis of resistance, includes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, as well as several militia groups in Iraq and Syria. Since Israel declared war on Hamas after the group launched a terrorist attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, other axis members have opened secondary fronts against Israel in a restrained manner, stopping short of igniting an all-out war. Militias in Iraq and Syria have attacked American military bases more than 70 times with drones and rockets.

As Israel expands its war in Gaza — in which more than 15,000 people, many of them women and children, have been killed, according to Gazan health officials — the axis groups have concluded they must significantly raise the prospect of a regional war to force a cease-fire, according to the Iranians affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.

The new plan includes Houthi attacks on Israeli and American-owned vessels operating in the Red Sea, according to the Iranians affiliated with the Guards. The Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria would also increase their attacks on American military bases with the intent to cause harm and damage, they said.

An additional aim, they added, is to destabilize maritime security, global shipping and energy supplies.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are providing the Houthis with intelligence to help identify Israeli-owned vessels in the Red Sea, said the two Iranians.

Western officials have said the intelligence is gathered by a ship operated by the Guards near the coast of Yemen. More recently, both a senior Western defense official and one of the Iranians familiar with the planning said Iran also had set up an intelligence outpost in the south of Iran to pass along information on Israeli ships to Houthis.

Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, has denied, publicly and in a recent interview with The New York Times, that Iran controls the Houthis and other militia groups. But senior Iranian military officials and advisers have said in public speeches and in social media posts that Iran is arming, supporting and coordinating with the militia.

Despite Iran’s plans to use the Houthis as a pawn in a larger regional strategy, Israeli and American intelligence officials said the Houthis presented significant risk of miscalculation and could inadvertently incite a larger regional war that Iranian officials have said they do not want.

American officials and other experts questioned whether Iran could rein in the Houthis, who launched drones this week at a U.S. Navy destroyer, if their actions got out of control.

“This is a difficult game to fine-tune for a group like the Houthis who are not just zealots but also have very little to lose,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group. “There are so many points of tensions. The longer the war goes on, the bigger the risk of tensions getting completely out of control.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Navy shot down a Houthi drone launched toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a narrow entrance to the Red Sea busy with commercial ships and tankers. The Houthis also said they had fired a barrage of ballistic missiles toward Eilat, Israel.

The Houthis on Sunday launched attacks against three commercial vessels in the Red Sea. And the American destroyer, the U.S.S. Carney, shot down a Houthi drone that was heading toward it, the Navy said in a statement.

Gen. Mohammad Ali al-Ghaderi, a Houthi naval commander, said of Sunday’s strikes: “the waters of our land will become the graveyard of the Zionist enemy’s ships,” according to news media reports in Iran and Yemen.

Washington is taking the threat seriously. This week it dispatched Tim Lenderking, the special envoy for Yemen, to the Persian Gulf for consultations with regional allies on how to safeguard maritime security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

In Washington and Tel Aviv, military strategists have contemplated strikes on Yemen to contain the Houthis, two American officials and the senior Western defense official.

U.S. officials have prepared preliminary Houthi targets in Yemen in case the Biden administration orders retaliatory strikes, the two American officials said, but so far, they added, Washington does not want to risk a wider regional war. Israel has also tempered its response to attacks from Hezbollah and the Houthis, limiting its reaction when attacked and relying instead on its defenses.

Current and former U.S. military commanders said Israel’s air defenses were sophisticated enough to knock down missiles and drones launched at Israel, but the threat to international waters was a bigger challenge.

“Their ability to hurt Israel is very, very limited,” said Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the former head of the military’s Central Command. “The bigger risk is if they use mines or short-range cruise missiles in the Bab el-Mandeb.”

A high-ranking Israeli defense official said that if a Houthi ballistic missile were to hit Israel and cause significant damage or kill civilians, it would be extremely difficult for Israel to not respond.

In the past few years, Israel has developed strong military and intelligence cooperation with Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, that have knowledge of Houthi targets and experience fighting them, according to military analysts.

One of the Iranian officials familiar with Iran’s planning said that the Houthis have said they would respond to any attack inside Yemen by closing the entrance to the Red Sea and indiscriminately firing a barrage of drones and missiles toward ships.

The Israeli military struck targets from the air, ground and sea across the Gaza Strip overnight into Saturday, it said, as aid-raid sirens warning of incoming rocket fire blared in Israeli communities near Gaza.

About a week into Israel’s new push in the south, the military said that much of the close-quarters fighting in its ground assault was taking place in Shajaiye, a neighborhood in northern Gaza that the Israeli military has called “a terrorist hotbed.”

The Israeli military said it had identified a number of fighters armed with anti-tank missiles approaching ground troops in the neighborhood and directed an Israeli helicopter strike there. It said it had also located and struck a tunnel shaft that was part of an extensive underground route in Shajaiye and located another tunnel shaft with an elevator and “numerous weapons.” The claims could not be independently confirmed.

Israel’s ground invasion, which began in northern Gaza in late October, has advanced south over the past week as intensive fighting spread through the enclave. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled northern Gaza for the south, and there are now few places for Gazans to go.

About 150,000 civilians are believed to remain in northern Gaza, according to the Israeli military. In recent days, the Biden administration has urged Israel to do more to limit harm to civilians, but some experts say they see no evidence that the military has moderated its tactics.

The Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, said the Al Aqsa hospital in northern Gaza had received the bodies of 71 people who were killed, and that a further 160 wounded had arrived for treatment, in the past 24 hours. More than 15,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began, according to Gaza health officials. Another 6,000 or so are missing, officials say.

The Israeli military also said it had engaged with fighters “in the area of a school” in Shajaiye and found AK-47 rifles, grenades and ammunition inside classrooms. In Beit Hanoun, also in northern Gaza, the Israeli military said its troops had struck at Hamas fighters who shot at them from a mosque and from a school run by UNRWA, the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians.

The claim could not be independently confirmed, and UNRWA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel has said that Hamas fighters are hiding out in hospitals, schools and other civilian areas in Gaza.

As the war continues, concerns have grown of a spillover of violence at Israel’s northern border, where the military has been exchanging sporadic fire with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militia. Early Saturday afternoon, a number of launches from Lebanon were fired toward northern Israel. The military said it had responded by targeting the source of the fire.

The strikes follow additional fire overnight, when the Israeli Air Force struck Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, including operational command-and-control centers, according to the army. There were also launches from Lebanon into Israel overnight, setting off aid-raid sirens warning of incoming rocket fire, and the Israeli army said it had responded by targeting the source of the fire.

Why Yemen’s Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea

ALTHOUGH NOT the first of their kind, the missile attacks on three bulk carriers in the Red Sea by Yemeni Houthi rebels on December 3rd marked a sharp rise in the risk to commercial shipping in the region. The USS Carney, an American Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer, shot down several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that appeared to be heading in its direction while it was sailing to assist the damaged carriers. Fortunately the attacks caused no injuries and fairly minor damage to the three ships.

America’s Central Command said it was considering “appropriate responses” to the attacks, which had been “fully enabled by Iran”. This careful wording reflects the probability that, though the missiles were undoubtedly supplied by Iran and the attacks would have been welcomed by its government, the Houthis may well have been acting off their own bat.

Israeli intelligence sources beg to differ. They are convinced that Iran ordered the attacks and that they are being co-ordinated by Brigadier-General Abdolreza Shahlaei, a veteran commander of Iran’s expeditionary Quds force. The hope in Tehran is that the attacks will drive up oil and shipping prices, putting pressure on Israel’s allies to rein it in. What seems certain is that more such attacks are likely.

Emile Hokayem, an expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London who knows how Iran uses its proxies in the region, says the attacks also mark a strategic opportunity for the Houthis—in a number of ways. First, by linking them to Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis can improve their standing in the Arab world, where the Palestinian cause remains popular and emotions are running high. The attacks let the Houthis show, as they always claim, that they are on the side of the oppressed. Moreover, they can hit a range of targets, not just ones at home or in Saudi Arabia.

Second, they send out a clear signal that the Red Sea is now a legitimate theatre for the struggle against Israel and that the Houthis are even willing to go after American warships as well as commercial shipping that may have some relationship with Israel, however tenuous. The sophistication of the attacks also shows that the Houthis are very far from being a raggle-taggle group of warriors, as they have sometimes been described.

Fabian Hinz, a specialist in Middle Eastern missile and UAV forces, also of the IISS, says the Houthis have received a huge number of anti-ship missiles and drones from Iran. They have also seized and adapted some from Yemen’s regular army. The Houthis have at least ten different anti-ship missiles in their arsenal, including sea-skimming Exocet-type missiles based on Chinese designs, such as the al-Mandab 1 and 2. These have a range of about 120km. The Houthis have the Quds Z-0 and Sayad cruise missiles, too, which boast ranges of up to 800km and which have radar, infrared or electro-optical seekers to home in on their targets.

The Houthis have an arsenal of anti-ship ballistic missiles that runs from short-range locally produced systems to longer-range and much heavier missiles, such as the Asef and the solid-propellant Tankil (based respectively on the Iranian Fateh and Raad-500 missiles, which carry a 300kg warhead and are designed to hit a warship up to 500km away). Because of the limited damage reported as a result of the latest attacks, it seems likely that smaller missiles were used.

Indeed, such are the Houthis’ capabilities that they may well have the potential to do in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the Red Sea’s southern choke-point, what Iran has often threatened to do in the Strait of Hormuz. Though a long-range Houthi ballistic missile aimed at Eilat was shot down last month by an Israeli Arrow 3 interceptor, Yemen is not an easy spot from which to attack Israel. It is, however, perfect for striking ships in the Red Sea.

A variety of Iranian attack-drones, including the Shahed 136 that Russia is using against Ukraine, is beefing up the Houthis’ arsenal. As far as those shot down by the Carney are concerned, Mr Hinz thinks these were probably intelligence and surveillance drones that the Iranians have cloned from America’s RQ-21. In addition to aerial drones, the Houthis also have naval ones and mine-laying devices.

American warships in the region are not at great risk from Houthi missiles. Their defences are simply too good, though a lucky strike from a salvo of attacks can never be ruled out. But it is another matter as to whether on their own they can provide much protection for commercial shipping. Following the latest incidents America’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, suggested talks were under way with allies to establish a larger naval task-force in the Red Sea.

If the Houthis keep shooting, there could be increasing pressure on the Americans to go after missile sites in Yemen, assuming they could be found. Yet the last thing America will want is to be dragged into Yemen’s civil war, which Joe Biden’s administration has recently been trying hard to dampen down. ■

IDF needs about 2 more months in Gaza to wrap up 1st stage of war, Israel believes

The Israeli military needs another three to four weeks to complete its current offensive in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and a similar amount of time after that to wrap up the first stage of the war against Hamas, according to a senior Israeli defense official.

The official told Axios in a report on Friday that while the US has not given Israel a deadline on ending its military operations in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 massacres, Washington has expressed that time was running out.

Israel is just over two months into a war with Hamas in Gaza, after the terror group launched an unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, when thousands of terrorists burst through the borders into southern Israeli communities, killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 hostages.

Israel declared war and has vowed to destroy Hamas following the shock terror onslaught, and to exercise caution to protect Gazan civilians who, according to defense officials, are used as human shields by Hamas terrorists deeply entrenched inside Gaza’s civilian fabric.

The defense official who spoke to Axios said the US and Israel disagreed by about a month on how long the war should continue, without further specifying.

According to the official, the Biden administration would be happy for Israel to finish intensive operations by the end of the month, but Jerusalem believes it needs until at least the end of January.

“The American message is that they would like to see us finish the fighting sooner, with less harm to Palestinian civilians and more humanitarian assistance for Gaza. We would also like this to happen, but the enemy does not always agree,” the official was quoted as saying.

“The Americans understand this and we are working together. We need them and they need us,” the official added.

A spokesperson for the US National Security Council told Axios in a statement that this was Israel’s war against Hamas and “the Israelis will decide their course.”

“We will continue to support Israel’s efforts to defend itself from Hamas terrorists,” the spokesperson said.

According to a separate report Friday, in Politico, which cited three anonymous Israeli officials, Biden administration officials have told Israel it has until the end of 2023 to conclude the war in Gaza against Hamas.

The news outlet noted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s reported warning last week that Israel likely has “weeks,” not months, to wrap up the fighting.

Blinken reportedly sat down with Israel’s war cabinet last Thursday to warn that time was of the essence to draw an end to the fighting amid mounting domestic and international pressure. When the Israelis laid out their plans for more months of fighting in Gaza as the military shifted focus to the south, Blinken said “You don’t have that much credit,” Politico reported.

“They advised us not to go into Gaza, but we did,” the official said. “We went into Gaza because that was the only way we could destroy Hamas and free our hostages. They told us, don’t go into the terror tunnels. But if we don’t go into the terror tunnels, there’s no way we can destroy Hamas. They told us not to go into the hospitals despite them being used by Hamas as command and control centers, but we went into those hospitals, and we did what we needed to do.”

“And we’ll do what we need to do to reach decisive victory,” the official added.

Responding to the Politico report late Friday, an NSC spokesperson indicated it was inaccurate: “These are Israeli military operations, and the Israelis will decide their course. We will continue to support Israel’s efforts to defend itself from Hamas terrorists,” the spokesperson said.

Troops of the Nahal Brigade are seen operating in northern Gaza’s Jabaliya, December 6, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)
On Thursday, another top US official expressed strong backing for Israel’s objectives in the war to destroy Hamas and said Washington had given no “firm deadline” on ending the war.

US Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer said during an on-stage interview at the Aspen Security Conference that Israel “has said that Hamas can no longer govern, can no longer be in charge of Gaza. We think that is a very legitimate objective, given what has happened on October 7 and since.”

Israel’s second main objective is that Hamas will no longer be allowed to pose the type of threat that it posed to Israel on October 7. “Frankly, if the war were stopped today, it would continue to pose [such a threat], which is why we’re not in place yet of asking Israel to stop or for a ceasefire,” Finer said.

The US on Friday vetoed a United Nations resolution backed by almost all other Security Council members and many other nations demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians are facing what the UN chief calls a “humanitarian nightmare.”

Washington has been pressing Israel to increase humanitarian aid to the Strip and the urgent need for maximum efforts to protect civilian life in Gaza amid a mounting death toll in the Hamas-ruled territory.

Blinken on Thursday issued the strongest warning to date on civilian losses, describing “a gap” between what Israel had pledged to do to protect Palestinian non-combatants and the results on the ground so far since military operations expanded into the south of the Strip last week.

Blinken said it remains “imperative” that Israel do more to prevent harm to civilians and that he had received assurances on this issue from Israeli officials during his visit last week.

“There does remain a gap between exactly what I said when I was there, between the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground,” he said Thursday at a joint news conference in Washington with visiting British Foreign Secretary David Cameron.

The defense official who spoke to Axios said Israeli forces “have made significant progress” in the northern part of the Gaza Strip since late October when Israel launched its ground campaign, but that maneuvering in the southern city of Khan Younis, where Israel believes much of the Hamas leadership is located, “has just started.”

The IDF has been pushing into Hamas strongholds across Gaza and forces have encircled the Strip’s major urban centers as they seek to destroy Hamas over its unprecedented assault on Israel on October 7.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Friday that there were signs the terror group’s defenses were cracking.

The Hamas Leader Who Studied Israel’s Psyche—and Is Betting His Life on What He Learned
When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was imprisoned in Israel more than a decade ago, he explained to an Israeli official a theory now central to the war in Gaza.

Sinwar said that what Israel considers its strength—that most Israelis serve in the army and soldiers hold a special status in society—is a weakness that can be exploited, said Yuval Bitton, who spent time with Sinwar as the former head of the Israel Prison Service’s intelligence division.

The idea proved accurate in 2011 when Sinwar was one of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners freed for a single Israeli soldier.

Now, Sinwar is holding hostage 138 Israelis, including soldiers, and the Hamas leader is betting he can force the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners and establish a permanent cease-fire. He’s relying on his judgment of Israeli society after two decades studying it in jail, learning Hebrew, watching the local news and getting inside the Israeli psyche.

But first, Hamas has to survive Israel’s powerful and deadly counterattack. If Hamas has miscalculated, Sinwar could be overseeing the destruction in Gaza of the U.S.-designated terrorist group—and lose his own life.

The gamble has already come with huge costs, including devastation across huge swaths of Gaza and the deaths of around 17,700 Palestinians.


Families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza in Tel Aviv on Thursday.Photo: abir sultan/EPA/Shutterstock

A Palestinian prisoner hugged his mother after being released in a hostage-prisoner trade between Hamas and Israel on Dec. 1. Photo: ammar awad/Reuters
Israel says its plan is to destroy Hamas’s leadership in the strip, including Sinwar, and prevent the group from ever again threatening Israeli communities after the Oct. 7 attacks killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. Still, after negotiating the release of women and children during a temporary cease-fire that collapsed this month, the Israeli government faces growing pressure to work with Sinwar for the freedom of the remaining hostages.

“He understands that Israel will pay a heavy price,” said Bitton. “He understands this is our weak spot.”

Sinwar’s playbook since becoming leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017 has been to constantly remind Israelis they are in conflict with Palestinians, one moment engaging constructively with Israel, and the next, pursuing violent means for political ends. He has a history of hunting down Palestinian collaborators with Israel, and his approach to the hostage negotiations was viewed by some Israelis as an attempt at psychological warfare.

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During the recent hostage negotiations, he cut off communications for days to put pressure on Israel to agree to a pause that would give Hamas time to regroup, according to Egyptian mediators. When the hostages were released, they were freed in batches each day, rather than in one go, creating a daily sense of anxiety in Israeli society.

Sinwar, who is in his early 60s, has since told Egyptian negotiators that the war won’t be over quickly, the way other rounds of violence in Gaza were, and could last for weeks, indicating he wants to squeeze as much as he can from Israel for the remaining captives.

At the moment, Sinwar is the main decision maker in Hamas as the most senior political leader in Gaza, who is working closely with Hamas’s military wing. The head of Hamas’s political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, is currently based in Doha, and his deputy, Saleh Arouri is in Beirut. While Hamas’s leadership in normal times makes decisions based on consensus, Israel believes Sinwar and Hamas militants around him in Gaza are more narrowly directing the war.

Spokespeople for Hamas didn’t respond to requests for comment on Sinwar and the group’s strategy.

Following the breakdown of the recent cease-fire, Hamas said that the militant group has only hostages who are soldiers and “civilians serving in the army,” and that it won’t release more of them until Israel ends its war. The group has said it is willing to free all the hostages in Gaza for all the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, estimated at more than 7,000 people. Israel says Hamas still holds both civilians and soldiers.

Israel’s strategy for getting the remaining hostages out focuses on making battlefield gains to force Hamas to release the captives. Israeli officials’ theory is Hamas was more willing to negotiate on the release of women and children because Israel had invaded Gaza and began to pressure the group militarily.  

Israeli forces are currently fighting Hamas in Khan Younis, where Sinwar grew up, and this week surrounded his house, a largely symbolic move as he is believed to be hiding elsewhere underground.

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Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, center, and deputy chief Saleh Arouri, left, met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran in June.Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/REUTERS

Palestinians following Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza on Thursday. Photo: Mohammed Dahman/Associated Press
Israel has vowed to kill Sinwar and all of Hamas’s top leadership, but senior officials have sent mixed messages over whether the government would be open to allowing lower-level Hamas fighters out of the strip.

One of the reasons Hamas mounted the Oct. 7 attacks was to kidnap soldiers to trade for Palestinian prisoners, according to Palestinian political analysts.

When Sinwar was freed in the 2011 swap, he thought Hamas should have pushed harder for Israel to release Palestinians responsible for bombings that killed Israelis and who were serving multiple life sentences, said people involved.  

As he was freed, Sinwar told those who hadn’t made the cut he would work to get them free, these people said.

“It’s a personal thing,” said Mkhaimer Abusada, a Palestinian who before the war taught political science at Al Azhar University in Gaza. “He doesn’t feel comfortable leaving jail in 2011 and leaving some of his comrades inside.”

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Should negotiations restart, Gershon Baskin, an Israeli peace activist who helped broker the 2011 agreement, said Israel would be unlikely to yield to Sinwar’s demand and give up Palestinians considered the most dangerous. Sinwar, waging war against Israel more than a decade after release, epitomizes why freeing prisoners who are serving life sentences is a risk for Israelis, he said.

“He is the primary reason why they wouldn’t agree to it,” said Baskin. “They made that mistake once.”

Hunting informants
Sinwar has spent more years as a member of Hamas inside prison than outside of it.

Before serving time, Sinwar was close to the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who himself had been released in 1985 in a swap involving more than 1,000 prisoners for three Israeli soldiers.

Sinwar worked with his mentor to hunt Palestinian informants suspected of working with Israel, according to Israeli officials. The internal security police set up by Sinwar was a forerunner of Hamas’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, these Israeli officials said.


A mural of late Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza City in 2022. Photo: mohammed saber/EPA/Shutterstock
In 1988, Israel detained him. During a series of interrogations, Sinwar explained how he rounded up a suspected Palestinian collaborator with Israel while the man was in bed with his wife, according to a transcript of his confession reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

He blindfolded the Palestinian, called Ramsi, and drove him to an area with a freshly dug grave where Sinwar strangled him with a scarf known as a keffiyeh, a symbol of the Palestinian cause.

“After strangling him, I wrapped him in a white shroud and closed the grave,” Sinwar said in his confession. “I was sure that Ramsi knew he deserved to die for what he did.”

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Sinwar described three similar killings of Palestinians he accused of collaboration, according to the transcript of the confession.

In another incident, Sinwar said he believed the brother of a Hamas operative was collaborating with Israelis, according to Michael Koubi, who was one of those who first interrogated Sinwar over more than 100 hours for Israel’s internal security service. Sinwar said he asked the Hamas operative to invite his brother to a meeting, and they put him in a grave and buried him alive, Koubi said.

Koubi said that in a separate interrogation, the Hamas leader confessed to killing 12 Palestinians before being arrested. None of the men Sinwar killed were working with Israeli security authorities, Koubi said.

As early as 1989, Sinwar told his interrogator he was planning to establish units that would conduct raids into Israel to kill and capture people, Koubi said.

Sinwar was also involved in the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers, according to the Israeli military. He was given multiple life sentences and spent 22 years in jail.

Hamas was in its infancy when Sinwar was jailed. It had evolved in Gaza from the Egyptian Islamist and social movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. In the year he was arrested, Hamas issued a charter of principles that included a goal of destroying Israel.

He was an influential member even inside prison. Prisoners are one of four power bases in Hamas, alongside members in the West Bank, in Gaza and in the diaspora outside the Palestinian territories, according to Israeli officials and independent researchers. Israel generally keeps Palestinians from the same factions housed in different areas of prisons, according to former Israeli prison officials. Hamas members establish hierarchies inside prisons similar to their outside structures, and choose a leader in each prison, and a top person across all Israeli prisons, the former Israeli prison officials said.

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People dressed as suicide bombers at a Hamas rally in Nablus in the West Bank in 2000. Photo: Jafar Ashtieh/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Members twice choose to make Sinwar their chief across the entire prison system, Bitton said. During the times he wasn’t chief, Sinwar held great sway over the people who were leaders, Bitton and Koubi said.

In 2000, Palestinians rose up against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza following collapsed peace talks over the creation of a Palestinian state. Hamas became involved in the uprising, known as the second intifada, waging attacks and some of the highest-profile suicide bombings. Sinwar’s role in the violence of the second intifada, if any, isn’t clear.

In 2004, he appeared to develop neurological problems, speaking unclearly and struggling with walking, Bitton said. Doctors examined him, finding an abscess in the brain that threatened his life. They rushed him from a prison near Beer Sheva to the city’s hospital for surgery.

After a successful operation, Sinwar returned to prison and thanked the doctors for saving his life, former prison officials said.

Sinwar gave Israeli officials the impression he wanted a halt to violence—at least in the short term. At the end of the Palestinian uprising in 2005, Sinwar was interviewed by an Israeli journalist inside prison. The leader told the journalist that Hamas would be open to a long-term cease-fire with Israelis that he said could stabilize the region, but would never accept Israel as a state. He said at that time that he understood Hamas could never defeat Israel militarily.  

Hamas, he said, is stubborn. “Just as we made the lives of the Jews bitter during the confrontation,” he said in Hebrew, referring to the intifada, during the interview. “We will make their lives difficult in dialogue about the cease-fire.”

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Plan to kidnap soldiers
Hamas operatives in 2006 surprised Israeli soldiers at a command post on the border of the Gaza Strip, kidnapping 19-year-old Gilad Shalit. One of the people responsible for orchestrating the kidnapping, according to Israeli officials, was Sinwar’s younger brother, Mohammed.  

Talks about freeing Shalit dragged on for years.

In prison, Sinwar and his fellow prisoners spent most of their lives in cells of three to eight people, getting out for two sessions a day in the yard to walk around for about an hour and half. They taught each other English and Hebrew and read history and the Quran, Bitton said.


Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, after being freed in an exchange for Palestinian prisoners. Photo: Ariel Schalit/Associated Press
During negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the release of Shalit, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis.

He wanted to release those who were involved in bombings during the second intifada that had killed large numbers of Israelis, such as at a hotel on a Jewish holiday that initially killed 19 and became known as the “Passover Massacre,” according to Bitton, Baskin and an Egyptian official, who helped broker the deal.  

Sinwar was so maximalist in his demands, Israel put him in solitary confinement to curtail his influence within Hamas, Bitton and the Egyptian official said.

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Israel eventually released some Palestinians who had committed murders and were considered dangerous, including Sinwar himself, who only just made the cut to get out, because Israelis had reservations about releasing him, Baskin said.

“Releasing him was the worst mistake in Israel’s history,” said Koubi, his interrogator while in jail.

A week after release in 2011, Sinwar told the Safa Press, a Palestinian news agency, that the best option for freeing prisoners left inside was to kidnap more Israeli soldiers.  

He arrived back in Gaza to a very different strip. Hamas now ruled it after wresting control from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority. The enclave was fenced off from the rest of Israel.

Sinwar again exerted influence within Hamas. During the war in 2014, he was involved in rounding up and killing suspected Palestinian informants for Israel, according to Israeli and Egyptian officials. Hamas called the killings “Operation Strangling Necks,” according to Amnesty International, which later documented the deaths.

One of those found dead and bullet-ridden during the conflict was the former spokesman for Hamas, Ayman Taha, according to Amnesty International. Taha had been a liaison between Hamas and Egyptian intelligence, according to Egyptian officials, who believe Sinwar ordered his death over concerns he was leaking information about Hamas’s relationship with Iran.

Hamas at the time said Taha appeared to have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.

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Sinwar, center, after his release in the exchange in 2011.Photo: Adel Hana/Associated Press
In 2016, Sinwar was involved in a decision to execute a senior commander of the armed wing, Mahmoud Ishtaiwi, according to Israeli and Egyptian officials and a person close to the murdered commander.

The exact reasons why aren’t clear. Egyptian officials say Sinwar arrested Ishtaiwi and convinced Hamas he was a spy for Israel. A Hamas official said the commander was an informant for Arab countries.

Before his death, Ishtaiwi told his family that Mohammed Deif, the head of the armed wing, had visited him and ordered other Hamas officials to release him, the person close to Ishtaiwi said. He was killed anyway.

Hamas at the time in a statement said the commander was executed for “behavior and moral” crimes.

A year later, Sinwar was voted as leader of Hamas in Gaza by its members. Other Hamas leaders assured members that his election as Gaza chief wouldn’t drag the group into new rounds of internal and external violence, according to Hamas officials.

Sinwar again said publicly Hamas was committed to the release of every Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails. He soon sought to reconcile Hamas with the Palestinian faction that governs the West Bank, warning he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way. Those talks failed to progress and Palestinian attempts to create their own state were complicated by internal divisions.

In 2021, Sinwar won a second term as Hamas leader in Gaza, again vowing to liberate Palestinian prisoners. In May that year, Hamas fired rockets on Jerusalem helping spark an 11-day conflict.

The death and destruction wrought in the conflict created a sense among the Israeli security establishment that Hamas was deterred and that Sinwar wouldn’t attempt to attack because he was more focused on building the strip economically.

Oct. 7 showed that was incorrect. While the initial lightning attack proved a success for Hamas, Sinwar made two mistakes, according to Amos Gilead, a former Israeli senior defense official. He thought that the attack would start a regional war involving Iran and Hezbollah, and that Israel wouldn’t invade Gaza to kill the Hamas leadership, Gilead said.

“Now his strategy is to gain time,” Gilead added. “But we don’t have any choice other than to destroy him.”

Write to Rory Jones at [email protected], Summer Said at [email protected] and Dov Lieber at [email protected]

Israel-Hamas War
Latest news and key analysis on the conflict, selected by the editors

Fight for Khan Younis Puts Israel, U.S. on Collision Course

U.S. seeking partners to safeguard ships after Red Sea attacks

The United States, attempting to contain the spread of Israel’s war in Gaza, is pitching allies on expanding a multinational naval task force to address an alarming rise in attacks on commercial vessels traveling near Yemen that have posed a significant threat to global shipping.

The White House says it’s a “natural response” after the Houthis, a Yemeni militant group aligned with Iran, have fired missiles and one-way drones at several ships and hijacked at least one in recent weeks. But it remains unclear whether the United States and its partners will be able to deter the Houthis or tamp down Israel’s demands for forceful action. Measures such as military strikes or designating the Houthis as terrorists could complicate efforts by the United Nations, the United States and the others to end a disastrous civil conflict in Yemen.

The Houthi attacks have underscored broader outrage across the Middle East over Israel’s assault on Gaza. The campaign has leveled neighborhoods, killed about 18,000 people and triggered a humanitarian disaster, prompting a wave of retaliatory attacks on U.S. and Israeli interests in the region.

Israel’s military continued combat operations across the Gaza Strip, striking major cities in the south and engaging in “intense fighting” with Hamas militants in two key regions in the north, a government spokesman said.

On Saturday, the Houthis declared they would target any ship that travels to Israel and does not stop in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. Ships with no ties to Israel or that do not travel there will be permitted to pass, the group said.

Israeli National Security Council head Tzachi Hanegbi said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spoken about the Houthi threat with President Biden and the leaders of Germany, France and Britain, telling them that “Israel is giving the world time to organize and prevent it.”

“If there is no international organization — because this is a global problem — we’ll work to remove the maritime closure,” he told Israel’s Channel 12. He did not respond to a question about whether he was referring to military action.

The Biden administration’s plan is to expand Combined Task Force 153, a military unit focused on the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, said a senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss government deliberations. It’s part of the Combined Maritime Forces, a group with 39 member nations that is headquartered in Bahrain.

CTF-153 is led by a U.S. Navy officer but the responsibility changes hands. An Egyptian commander oversaw it previously. The unit reports to the commander of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, who also is based in Bahrain.

Many countries have an interest in preventing a disruption of commercial shipping through this part of the world, a point administration officials have stressed to other nations as talks progress, said a U.S. defense official familiar with the issue. The official described the effort as mostly “aspirational,” with an unclear timeline thus far as allies and partners assess how they might participate.

The senior administration official disputed that characterization, saying discussions are active.

“Our focus,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on Thursday, “is ensuring that there are sufficient military assets in place to deter these Houthi threats to maritime trade in the Red Sea and in the surrounding waters to the global economy writ large. … We’ve actually heard some interest from several key partners.”

He did not identify any of the other “like-minded” nations. The Pentagon said Thursday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had spoken with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Khalid bin Salman, “to discuss Houthi threats to freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has had a similar conversation with his French counterpart, and on Saturday a French vessel downed two drones purportedly launched from Yemen.

Using a maritime security force to protect the region’s waterways is a good idea, said Mick Mulroy, a Pentagon official during the Trump administration with extensive experience in the Middle East. But finding enough ships to effectively carry it out could be challenge, he assessed.

“The U.S. could do a lot of it, but may need to shift ships from other areas,” he said.

The Houthis, a rebel group from northern Yemen, seized the country’s capital in 2014 and deposed the government, triggering a civil war that has killed tens of thousands and caused one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises. Analysts say Iran’s ties to the Houthis strengthened over the course of the conflict, as Tehran became a critical source of weapons and financing for the militants.

The movement’s leader, Abdulmalik al-Houthi, warned days after the Hamas cross-border attack that triggered Israel’s assault that his fighters would retaliate if “red lines” were crossed, including if the United States intervened in Gaza — actions that would be met, he said, by “missile strikes, marches and military options,” according to the Houthi-run Masirah news channel. He acknowledged “coordinating” with other Iranian-backed groups in the region, and said, “we are ready to intervene with all we can.”

His threat, at the time, may have been overlooked. Global attention was focused on an imminent Israeli ground invasion of Gaza and fears about a widening of the conflict in southern Lebanon as well as in Syria and Iraq, where other Iranian proxies are located. On Oct. 19, the Houthis launched the first of their recent attacks: cruise missiles aimed at Israel that were shot down by the USS Carney, a Navy destroyer in the Red Sea.

On Nov. 19, the Houthis hijacked a commercial vessel, the Galaxy Leader, in the Red Sea and took 25 crew members hostage.

A week later, the USS Mason, another Navy destroyer, responded to a distress call in the Gulf of Aden from a commercial vessel, the M/V Central Park, as five armed men attempted to seize the ship, officials said. They were captured by U.S. personnel. Pentagon officials have said they think the men were Somali, but have not clarified whether that is the case. Hours later, at least one ballistic missile was launched from Yemen in the direction of the Mason and the Central Park, defense officials said.

The Carney downed an unmanned aircraft emanating from Yemen on Nov. 29 as it headed for the warship, though it was not clear how the drone was to be used, defense officials said.

Earlier this month, Houthi forces launched four attacks against three commercial ships in the Red Sea. Ballistic missiles hit the M/V Unity Explorer, the M/V Number 9 and the M/V Sophie II, defense officials said. The Carney, which responded to related distress calls, also shot down an unmanned aircraft.

The Houthis appear to have calculated that there are more benefits than risks associated with their attacks, analysts said, staking a position that resonates with overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian sentiment in Yemen, and one that bolsters the movement’s standing and recognition in the region, including among Iranian-backed groups.

Among those groups, the Houthis are possibly the least constrained, having no political partners to answer to, or any rival military force.

“They don’t have a lot of pressure inside,” Mustapha Noman, a Yemeni analyst, writer and former diplomat, said at a Chatham House briefing on Yemen on Friday. “I think they dream that the Americans or the Israelis attack them, because that will turn them into a real ‘resistance’ force,” he said.

The Houthi attacks — and any response to them from the United States and its allies — could also help quiet domestic complaints the Houthis faced over their failure to provide services and other benefits to the public.

“At war, people do not ask for anything,” he said. The Houthis “can do whatever they want.”

The situation has left the United States with limited options, said Gregory D. Johnsen, a nonresident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. The Trump administration had designated the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, but the Biden administration rolled that back in part because it would have limited the ability to ease the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, he said.

“They’re not quite a nation-state. They’re not quite a terrorist group,” Johnsen said. “They’re sort of this hybrid mixture. The U.S. is obviously wary of getting pulled into any sort of military conflict, but if the U.S. doesn’t do anything, then the Houthis are likely to continue escalating, as they have been over the last two months.”

Asked on Thursday if Biden was reconsidering having delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group, Kirby said, “We are going to review that decision.”

Saudi Arabia — the Houthis’ adversary throughout the civil war — is paradoxically one of the few countries that might have leverage with the Yemeni militants, as the two parties negotiate the terms of a cease-fire that both badly want, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow at Chatham House focusing on Yemen and the Persian Gulf.

But the Saudis were possibly the more desperate party, wanting to extricate themselves from a war that damaged the country’s international reputation, threatened its ambitious domestic agenda and delivered none of the desired results, including destroying or even degrading the Houthis.

“They are quite confident that no matter how much they escalate, this will not hurt their arrangement with the Saudis,” Muslimi said, referring to the Houthis.

In Sanaa, the Houthi-controlled capital, some residents suggested that the end of Israel’s offensive was the only solution.

“What is happening in Palestine is a major crime and must not be tolerated,” said Ridhwan Mohammed bin Mohammed, 48, a warehouse manager. “We do not care about any reaction from America or Israel.”

They were held captive by Hamas, but their biggest fear was Israeli airstrikes
Released hostages Chen Goldstein-Almog and daughter Agam call on Israel to strive to release the 140 people still held in Gaza, and reveal hostages are being sexually assaulted: 'Such assaults didn't only happen on October 7'

Earlier this month, Chen and Agam Goldstein-Almog visited the cemetery on Kibbutz Shefayim for the first time. Walking through the paths of this community north of Tel Aviv, they were reminded of their own kibbutz. So many names on the gravestones were familiar.

"I keep having to remind myself that all these people are no longer with us," says Chen, 49. "I ask myself, 'Why?' Why did they murder that old lady, or that lovely lady, or that entire family?"

They were all neighbors on Kibbutz Kfar Azza, their home their whole lives and from where they were kidnapped into Gaza on October 7. It may be that only in this beautiful yet unfamiliar cemetery, a temporary one for Kfar Azza victims, does the scope of the calamity become clear. Sixty-two members of the kibbutz were murdered that day.

"Kfar Azza no longer exists, many people have left," Agam says. "But some have remained."

Chen and Agam, who turns 18 next month, came to the cemetery to visit Nadav and Yam, the father of the family and his oldest daughter, whom Hamas shot dead at close range right in front of Chen and Agam. The latter two were then abducted into the Gaza Strip, along with two younger brothers, Tal, 9, and Gal, 11.

Standing in the cemetery facing Nadav and Yam's graves, Chen and Agam had a hard time processing what happened. "It's simply not them, it will never be them," Agam says.

"They're so alive, in our memories and up to the last second. There was just one shot and that was it, as if nothing more was needed. They're still so much with us."

About two weeks have gone by since Chen and Agam were released, and they feel that it's now time to tell their story, a mother and daughter now eternal partners to things they can talk about and mainly to things that can't be expressed in words.

They want to bear witness for the nearly 140 hostages still in Gaza – women, men and children. It's for them that they want to talk about their seven weeks in Gaza: the terrible silence when they were kidnapped, the long days under threat of Israeli airstrikes, the horrors they heard from other hostages, and the horrors they heard about their own family.

On good days, after negotiations with their captors, they could listen to Israeli radio. That's how they understood the scope of the disaster. That was how Chen finally realized that Nadav and Yam had been murdered.

It's a strong family that's trying to start anew. Agam says she has a hard time describing what they went through.

"I talk about it, but only my body feels the sensations I had there," she said. "We kept looking at each other and saying that no one would understand."

The fear doesn't let up

It took only seven minutes – from the dirt parking lot next to their house to the place Chen and Agam were held in the middle of Gaza. The terrorists took them in Chen's car through the broken fence that's only a few dozen meters from their house. Then they headed west.

"It's the unbearable ease it happened with, the quiet," Chen recalls. The looks Gal and Tal gave them as it was happening confirmed that they understood what she understood – they were being kidnapped. But Agam believes that in the car she still didn't realize what was happening.

"Even when we reached Gaza I didn't understand," she says. "I kept looking at my mother, asking her where we were being taken. I think the terrorists weren't sure either. They asked us at the beginning whether to turn left or right."

When do you think you realized you were hostages?

"There was one second where I asked my mother if they would torture me. That was when I started to realize what was happening."

When Agam speaks – easily, articulate and mature – the rest of the family falls silent. Before October 7, she was a busy young woman with work, volunteering and friends. She's still like that. A week ago Saturday she took part in a run for the hostages, and on other days she meets with her friends. During our conversation, another friend is waiting for her – she too is fascinated by Agam.

But Agam is also scared. "The fear was constant and it's in my head now too when nothing is happening," she says, sure enough of herself to say so.

"The hostages are going through some very harsh things, but I want to talk about the sense of freedom that was taken from us, and about the fear when your life and control over it is taken from you. You can't live like that for many days."

Chen, Agam and their brothers learned that there is no clear pattern to being a hostage. The cruelty often depends on the guards and the time since the abduction.
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Every once in a while they were moved to a different location, sleeping on mattresses spread out on the floor. They experienced hunger (and lost weight accordingly), but they say they didn't unduly suffer from it.

From time to time they ate rice and pita bread. Once they had maqluba, a dish of meat, rice and fried vegetables. The children had snacks they weren't familiar with, and they played cards and other games for hours on end.

On good days, after negotiations with their captors, they could listen to Israeli radio. That's how they understood the scope of the disaster. That was how Chen finally realized that Nadav and Yam had been murdered. At the end of an interview with Chen's father, Giora, the interviewer offered her condolences for the death of his son-in-law and granddaughter.

Agam says they sometimes talked with the terrorists about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We had some deep conversations, as well as difficult ones in which they started cursing us," she says, adding that she drew some strength from these moments. "To believe in humanity, in the existence of some good, you have to have conversations."

Did you respond to them at all?

Chen: "Yes, there were conversations about the roots of the conflict. Some of them talked nicely, saying they wanted to be our neighbors; others didn't. The latter said that they intended to live where we lived, that we'd have to leave for other countries. We didn't feel that those conversations or the airstrikes were diminishing their motivation."

During their weeks in Gaza, Chen, Agam, Gal and Tal were repeatedly moved from one location to another, on foot or on donkeys, as the Israeli bombs fell. "We were in real danger. At some point they started moving us every night," Chen says.

"Our guards were also clueless, arguing where to take us. We saw this on their faces. But I felt that the more they were hit [by Israeli bombs outside], the higher they held their heads. They were drunk with their success of October 7."

Once, during a trip through a tunnel, Chen and Agam found themselves facing a few other female hostages. The meeting was very moving but painful, Chen says. She learned that other hostages were suffering worse.

After her release, other former hostages told her they had been sexually assaulted. "These things happened, difficult things, I heard it directly," she says. Such assaults didn't only happen on October 7. "They could have been spared this experience if they'd been released earlier," says Chen, a trained social worker.

She notes the strength of the women she met. She remembers how happy they were when she was released, believing that their turn was coming soon.

"Those women are strong; they support each other, even if one of them breaks down and some of them are wounded," Chen says, her eyes lighting up. "They're simply amazingly strong."

The danger: an operation to free them

The government says the resumption of the ground offensive increases the chances that the other hostages will be released, as was the case after 51 days of intense fighting when over 80 women and children were swapped for Palestinian prisoners. But there's also another angle.

"The airstrikes wiped us out; it was very difficult, something physical that affects your heart and soul, your whole body," Chen says. "When we heard on the radio that the fighting was intensifying, it drove us into despair. We couldn't understand how we were there while the fighting was getting worse. There were times we were in danger of being killed by the bomb blasts."

Mother and daughter Chen and Agam. 'I talk about it, but only my body feels the sensations I had there.'

The most terrifying notion for them was a rescue operation. "They [the terrorists] were right beside us, in the same room the whole time," Chen says. "We told ourselves that any operation like that would put us at risk. We were very worried about that."

She says she also thought about Nadav, her partner since she was in eighth grade, and her daughter, Yam, "the girl who made me a mother." Maybe somehow they had survived. But when Chen, Agam, Gal and Tal found themselves in the middle of the Gaza inferno, even those thoughts disappeared.

"There were weeks when we couldn't think, when we were busy with our existence, because the attacks only intensified," Chen says. "One week I was totally preoccupied with calming my body down and didn't think about Nadav and Yam."

Under the smoke of the airstrikes and the terror that never let up, Chen and Agam clung to each other. "We became a couple with two children [the younger boys]," Agam laughs, and Chen agrees. "Agam was my partner; I had to remember that she was my daughter, because for a few moments I'd forget. She isn't even 18."

When possible, they talked. When this was prohibited, one look sufficed. That's how the days passed. "Every day in captivity is like a week," Agam says. "Two months have gone by, but for the hostages it's a lot longer."

Throughout their captivity, a kind of psychological warfare was waged against them, Chen says. Their Hamas captors repeatedly told them that a cease-fire was imminent and they would be released, but that time was a while coming. The excitement was real, but the stage when Hamas transferred them to the Red Cross was humiliating.

"We thought it would be low-key, but Hamas turned it into a big show; we were there facing a large crowd," Chen says, remembering the long walk from the vehicles they had been brought in to the Red Cross.

"We couldn't understand how Israel was allowing that to happen, with all that walking and pictures being taken," she says. "Even when we got into the car and it was locked, people ran after us, beating on the windows. During the trip they tried to use Waze, but the roads suddenly disappeared due to the destruction. The whole thing was very unpleasant, very undignified."

'When we were about to get out, the female hostages who were with us told us to go to demonstrations and fight for them. They told us not to give up so that they would be released too.'

Their first conversation with their family was by phone, after they reached the Hatzerim airbase southeast of Gaza. Chen mentioned how brave the children had been, and how pained they were about Nadav and Yam. Only then did other members of the family, who were trying to decide who would tell them about Nadav and Yam, realize that they already knew.

Eleven-year-old Gal told his relatives about a piece of good news after his release. A soldier he met on the helicopter lent him his phone so he could check the results: The Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team had won a game in Europe.

The uncertain future

Chen lived the good life before October 7, she says. Nadav would return home at 7 P.M., and she liked being a full-time mother. "Everybody came and went, and I was there, feeling like an anchor – that I would always be there," she says.

In the current routine, far from their destroyed kibbutz home, Chen is still an anchor. But the challenges persist as they shift from grief to an attempt to come to terms with their experience. Chen and her family are trying to figure out what's next – where and with whom they'll be living, what will become of them.

One thing – or people actually – she knows well: The social workers, psychologists and other professionals who have been helping the extended family since the day of the calamity. People from the government have been there the whole way, and now they're helping her decide on the family's next moves – for which there's no playbook.

"I'm trying to pick up the pieces," she says, adding that she tries not to get swallowed up in grief. "Each time I touch it a bit and then retreat, because it can suck you in," she says.

Agam plans to commemorate her father and sister any way she can – "first of all, through my values, which were also my father's values."

And it's not all gloom; there's plenty of life and love, and the odd laugh after a good joke. Then there's what seems to be the first item in the unwritten will left behind by Nadav and Yam: Stay together. This is what Chen, Agam, Gal and Tal did after they were kidnapped.

And this is what others did, people like Varda and Gogo, Giora and Shlomit, Inbar, Omri and other family members who fought for their return. And now that they're finally together, they're fighting for the remaining hostages.

"When we were about to get out, the female hostages who were with us told us to go to demonstrations and fight for them," Chen says. "They told us not to give up so that they would be released too."

Members of the Goldstein-Almog family plan to go to every demonstration. Chen says the ones who were left behind hoped their release "would happen by Hanukkah. We all thought they were next, and it got bogged down. They're waiting; wow how they want to get out."

Every day like ‘Russian roulette’: Freed hostages share accounts of Hamas captivity

Nearly two weeks after the collapse of a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas, freed hostages have increasingly gone public with accounts of their time in captivity.

On Monday, Sharon Aloni-Cunio likened being a hostage in Gaza to “Russian roulette,” saying that every day she feared she and her two young daughters could be executed.

“Every minute is critical. The conditions there are not good and the days go on forever,” she told Reuters. “It’s a Russian roulette. You don’t know whether tomorrow morning, they’ll keep you alive or kill you, just because they want to or just because their backs are against the wall.”

Cunio, 34, and her 3-year-old twins Yuli and Emma were released on November 27, as part of a weeklong ceasefire that saw Hamas release 105 of the roughly 240 hostages abducted during the terror group’s onslaught in southern Israel on October 7.

Still held hostage by Palestinian terrorists when the truce collapsed were 138 people — 114 men, 20 women, and two children — though in recent days the IDF has confirmed the deaths of 18 of the hostages held by Hamas, due to new intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza.

Aloni-Cunio said that her husband David, who is still a hostage, was separated from her and her daughters three days before they were released.

“I am petrified I will get bad news that he is no longer alive,” she was quoted as saying. “We are not just names on a poster. We are human beings, flesh and blood. The father of my girls is there, my partner, and many other fathers, children, mothers, brothers.”

“Every day there is crying, frustration, and anxiety. How long are we going to be here? Have they forgotten about us? Have they given up on us?”

“My children are torn,” she continued. “I am torn without my second half, the love of my life, the father of my daughters, who ask me every day, where is daddy?”

Chen Goldstein-Almog, who was also freed during the truce, on Monday told the Kan public broadcaster that she met three hostages who told her they were sexually assaulted by their captors, and heard a similar story about a fourth.

“We heard three stories first-hand, and another story that was told to us,” Goldstein-Almog said. “Things that happened a few weeks after they arrived in Gaza. They are physically injured.”

“With the way they sexually assaulted them and desecrated their bodies, they don’t know how they will cope,” she added. “If they had been released earlier, they would have been spared. We also saw a guy who was beaten.”

“Everything must be done to get them out.”

There have been multiple accounts of rape and sexual assault by Palestinian terrorists on October 7, and a doctor who treated some of the hostages released by Hamas said at least 10 of them — both men and women — were sexually assaulted or abused while in captivity.

Goldstein-Almog, 48, and three of her four children, Agam, 17, Gal, 11, and Tal, 9, were released on November 26, as part of the hostage release deal. Her husband Nadav and eldest daughter Yam were murdered on October 7.

On Saturday evening, a few thousand Israelis gathered in what has come to be known as Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, where they viewed harrowing clips of released hostages revealing horrific details from their time in the Gaza.

Margalit Mozes, 77, who was kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Oz, said in her video that a terrorist took her oxygen concentrator machine, which she needs to sleep, despite her explaining to him in Arabic, “This is my oxygen.”

In her video, Adina Moshe, 72, said that good friends of hers from Kibbutz Nir Oz remain in Gaza, all of them elderly, sick, and without adequate medications.

“When I was there, the food situation there deteriorated. We eventually reached the point of only eating rice,” she said, pleading for Israel to do everything to secure the remaining hostages’ release. Until that happens, she said, “I won’t be able to recover.”

At least 38 people from Nir Oz were murdered on October 7, and 75 abducted.

A video from siblings Maya (21) and Itay (18) Regev showed them saying that every day in captivity “is like hell — intense fear, zero sleep, the lack of knowledge is simply scary.”

They said each day there was “like eternity” and that they missed their family and suffered from hunger and difficult conditions.

The hostages were kidnapped on October 7, when some 3,000 terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea, killing some 1,200 people and seizing over 240 people of all ages under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities.

The vast majority of those killed as gunmen seized border communities were civilians — including babies, children, and the elderly. Entire families were executed in their homes, and over 360 people were slaughtered at an outdoor festival, many amid horrific acts of brutality by the terrorists.

How Hamas Used Sexual Violence on October 7th

Physicians for Human Rights Israel issued a report collecting evidence of sexual and gender-based violence. One of its authors lays out their findings.

Earlier this week, the Israeli government presented evidence at the United Nations about rape and mutilation committed by Hamas militants during the attack on October 7th, in which more than twelve hundred people were killed. “I was called down on October 7 to collect bodies and remains from the terror attack,” Simcha Greinman, a volunteer medical worker, said. “I saw in front of my eyes a woman. She was naked. She had nails and different objects in her female organs. Her body was brutalized in a way that we cannot identify her, from her head to her toes.” An Israeli police superintendent shared testimonies from eyewitnesses, including one who saw girls with broken pelvises from “repetitive rapes.”

While some accounts of the horrific violence have now been corroborated by reporting from the BBC and other news agencies, one of the first comprehensive examinations of the sexual and gender-based violence on October 7th was conducted by a nonprofit called Physicians for Human Rights Israel, whose mission is to combat medical discrimination and improve access to health care in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. In a position paper, published last month, the organization called for an investigation into “widespread” sexual violence. “Based on the currently available information and the accounts indicating that sexual and gender-based violence occurred across several locations,” the report states, “an inquiry must be conducted to examine whether their scope and manifestations amount to crimes against humanity under international humanitarian law.” (The Israeli government has criticized the United Nations, saying its women’s-rights agency remained silent about the accusations of sexual violence until almost two months after the attack. Hamas has denied that its fighters committed sexual violence.)

I recently spoke by phone with one of the paper’s authors, Hadas Ziv, who is the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and who lives in Tel Aviv. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why gathering information about sexual violence perpetrated on October 7th has been so difficult and contentious, how the report was put together, and the importance of collecting horrific stories to insure that survivors receive proper care.

What do we know about the sexual violence that occurred on October 7th?

Our position paper is based on materials that we collected from public media outlets and videos that we saw in groups on Telegram, as well as discussions with a legal adviser and a doctor who volunteers with a civil-society group that’s supporting the hostages and the families. We haven’t interviewed actual witnesses.

What I can say with a really high degree of certainty is that it wasn’t a few cases. It wasn’t here and there, or only on one occasion. There were many cases of different gender-based and sexual violence, and they were in the kibbutzim and in the Nova music festival: the most extreme gang rapes, mutilation of body parts, putting objects into women’s bodies, and having women paraded like trophies when they were taken into Gaza.

You say that you have not talked to the victims themselves. Is that because most of the victims are now dead? Are there people who are still alive who you’ve tried to talk to? I know this is very bleak and complicated. I’m just trying to understand.

Our decision was not to approach the actual victims or the eyewitnesses because we thought that this was too short a time afterward, and that we were not equipped to talk to them and treat them. Every time you ask them to tell the story, it’s opening up the trauma, and we are not professionals in this. What we wanted to do in this early stage was to try to portray the picture as we see it, and not leave the women’s groups alone on this—because we thought, It’s a human-rights issue, and it’s our obligation to look at what has happened. Actually, we issued two position papers after October 7th. One was about how Hamas specifically targeted rescue teams in order to prevent evacuation, prevent treatment; they shot paramedics, and they shot the tires of ambulances. The other issue was the sexual assault.

Can you talk more about how you put this report together?

It is a unique report for us because usually we don’t work on issues like this. As far as the conflict is concerned, it’s the first time that we have analyzed the actions of Hamas, of the Palestinian militants, because usually what we do is we speak about patients in Gaza and the humanitarian situation in Gaza and freedom of movement. That’s our expertise. Now we had to take our expertise into our own society and look into what happened during the conflict. I watched a lot of videos and I asked for connections within different groups and people in the Army, who sent me photographs. Then I looked on Telegram and I went into the materials that were made public. Roni Ben Canaan, my partner on this, was experienced in gender-based violence. She came from a hotline that helps women who were victims, and now she’s working with Physicians for Human Rights.

We had three aims. One was to see what has happened and to give a picture to the Israeli public and to the international public. The second was that we cared about the hostages and, from history and other cases, we know that violence doesn’t stop with the abduction. It sometimes continues when you are held hostage, and we wanted to pressure our government to do everything within its power to release them as soon as possible. Another significant aim was to make our medical and health-care system aware and create a trauma-sensitive system to accept victims and to treat them.

So one concern was that, given the scale of sexual violence on October 7th, sexual violence could continue—and that was one reason it was imperative to get the hostages back as soon as possible?

Yes. We know that people who witness sexual violence or experience sexual violence are in need of really, really urgent treatment. We know they do not receive this treatment while in Gaza, but in fact suffer further violence and neglect.

I’m trying to understand whether we have some sense of how many people experienced this on October 7th.

I think it was widespread. But, from what I understand, there are a few difficulties. First of all, some of the bodies that reached the national forensic institute were beyond identification. They were completely burnt. The rescue teams were traumatized. Because it was the first time that we saw sexual violence in conflict—this is something we haven’t seen before—they did not come prepared to collect the testimony and collect the evidence that is needed. Much of the material has not been released yet. It’s in the hands of the police.

When you say this had never happened before, you’re saying that there’d been attacks in Israel from Hamas militants and others, but there’d never been sexual violence like this—and when the police and military came that they weren’t prepared to work with survivors or victims of sexual violence?

They did not expect it. They were surprised. For example, as in one of the testimonies, if an ambulance driver or a paramedic sees a woman, a youth, legs spread, lower body exposed, semen on her back, he says she was raped, but he’s not an expert. All we know is there was sexual abuse here because of how we found the body, but he’s not an expert to say that she was raped. But, as far as the mutilation is concerned, this is something that we are certain of because you don’t need to be an expert in order to see that a breast is cut off.

When you talk about watching Telegram videos, can you explain what you mean?

This is something that I’ve done because, in the beginning, when we started writing the report, we did not think that we would find ourselves in a situation where people would ask us, “Prove it. How do you know?” We thought that the testimonies we used in our report from two women at the Shura military base, where most of the bodies were taken, and a paramedic from the Army and some eyewitnesses—we thought that was enough. One of the women was assigned to the forensic medical team. One was responsible for handling the bodies of female soldiers. But more and more, we were asked, “How can you say it? How can you prove it?” Then I found that I needed to look at some of the videos.

I saw two videos that are widely distributed. There was one of a woman who has been pulled into a jeep and her pants are bloody, and you see that they are really violently dragging her into the vehicle. And the other one is of a woman half-dressed and her body’s in an open truck and she’s being paraded like a trophy. I think she’s dead already, but I can’t be certain and people are spitting on her. I also saw the beheading of a man, and bodies that had been burned. I went into this one Hamas group on Telegram, but I stopped because it was too much.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, “The extensive evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7 should not be contaminated by unverified stories disseminated by Israeli search and rescue groups, army officers and even Sara Netanyahu.” Sara Netanyahu is the wife of the Prime Minister. It does seem like there are false stories circulating as well as true stories. How did you deal with that?

We were very careful in not trusting sources that we thought might be unreliable. For example, the Israeli security agency released confessions of Hamas people and we took those with more than a grain of salt. We thought, It can be that they were threatened. It can be that they are tortured because we know that sometimes torture is used on Palestinian prisoners and detainees. We thought, We cannot rely on them.

In order to say that it was systematic, you need to show orders and a method, but saying that something was “widespread” was easier to feel sure about. It’s for the legal teams to investigate whether it was systematic and to define whether the scale is large enough to define it as a crime against humanity. We ask for people to investigate. When I looked at the videos, and I spoke to a doctor to confirm, for example, that doctors saw mutilation. I consulted and heard from a doctor, and he spoke to his colleagues and they saw torn vaginas.

I know that maybe some cases will be refuted, but I think that we have enough to say that the picture is still correct. I don’t trust politicians at all. If Sara Netanyahu says something, she’s not an eyewitness, she’s not part of a rescue team.

When you said you talked to a doctor, did you mean that if a media report would quote a doctor, you would try to reach out to that doctor?

No. I spoke to a doctor who is involved with supporting the families of the hostages, and I asked him to speak to doctors in hospitals and rescue teams and to see whether they can confirm that it was widespread, whether they’ve seen evidence of that. And he spoke to a few of his colleagues and then he said, “Yes, it did happen.”

You spoke earlier about how this was new for your group. How do you think this work fits into its larger mission?

First of all, we always work with Israeli residents, but not in relation to the conflict. This is the first time that we analyzed what Hamas was doing to Israelis because we work on policy matters—public health and against privatization and with migrant workers and with prison detainees. I think the message is important that we are doing it because we are a human-rights organization. To look the other way and leave women’s organizations alone would not be respectful. They will need to deal with most of the cases, because many women who are raped will not go to the police. First of all, they go to the hotlines. We know it from civil rapes, not just in armed conflict.

I think one should have a big enough heart to look at victims anywhere. For me as a woman, it was extremely traumatic to see, and it was important to acknowledge it, to recognize what has happened, to call on our government not to abuse the victims as tools in propaganda but, rather, really look into what they need to regain control of their lives. This is what we wanted—to support them. ♦

Israel-Hamas War: Attacks in Red Sea and on Israel Bolster Houthis’ Regional Standing

Shooting missiles toward Israel and attacking ships sailing through the Red Sea, Yemen’s Houthi militia has been gaining popularity across the Middle East and building regional clout that could help expand its power at home, analysts say.

In a major escalation of Houthi actions against Israel, the Iran-backed militia hit a Norwegian tanker on Monday with a cruise missile — one of its first successful strikes after weeks of threats, although no casualties were reported. The Houthis have also attempted missile and drone attacks on southern Israel, but those were thwarted. Last month, they hijacked a commercial ship.

Across the Middle East, where the war in Gaza has left citizens seething with anger at Israel and the United States — and in some cases, at their own American-backed governments — people have hailed the Houthis as one of the only regional forces willing to challenge Israel with more than harsh words.

“What they did has given us dignity, because they did this in a time when everyone was watching idly,” said Khalid Nujaim, who works at a medical supply company in Sana, the Yemeni capital, which is controlled by the Houthis.

A once-scrappy tribal group, the Houthis have taken over much of northern Yemen since they stormed Sana in 2014, gradually increasing their military capabilities and effectively winning a war against a Saudi-led coalition that spent years trying to rout them. Now that the most intense fighting in Yemen’s civil war has largely died down, the armed group is increasingly functioning as a de facto government.

They have described their recent attacks as a campaign in solidarity with the 2.2 million Palestinians living under Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza, which was launched in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas.

That campaign has transformed the Houthis from a local and regional force into one with a global impact, said Yoel Guzansky, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

“At the end of the day, what they really want is a bigger stake in Yemen, and perhaps they want to do that through becoming a global problem,” said Mr. Guzansky, a former Israeli official.

Particularly now, when the Houthis are on the verge of a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that would potentially recognize their control over northern Yemen, the war in Gaza is “a massive opportunity for them to get legitimacy in region,” said Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni research fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, the London-based research group. “Right now everyone who is in the region is confusing the Yemenis with the Houthis, and for the Houthis, that’s the best thing that can happen.”

In statements announcing their attacks, the Houthis call themselves the “Yemen armed forces” — brushing aside the presence of an internationally recognized government and other armed groups based in the country’s south.

These days, wherever he goes in the region, Ahmed Nagi, a senior Yemen analyst at the International Crisis Group, finds that people are thrilled to learn that he is from Yemen, and quickly begin “talking about the Houthis and how brave they are,” he said.

“This is a very deep reflection of public opinions across the Arab countries at this moment,” Mr. Nagi said. He expressed concern that people might increasingly believe that they cannot trust their state actors, and that nonstate actors like the Houthis are their only hope to challenge what they see as Western hegemony.

Support for the Palestinian cause and hostility toward Israel has long been a pillar of the Houthi narrative; “Death to America, death to Israel” is in the group’s slogan. Part of the way they frame themselves is in opposition to American-backed Arab leaders, whom they view as “just mercenaries for the West,” Mr. Nagi explained.

Arab governments that once went to war with Israel and led an oil embargo to punish its Western backers have mostly reacted to the war in Gaza with public condemnations, aid campaigns and diplomatic efforts to push for a cease-fire, reinforcing a sense of impotence among some of their citizens who would prefer to see them cut ties with Israel or take other, more forceful actions.

At a news briefing on Tuesday, Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, described the Houthis as Iranian proxies “with the self-awareness of cartoon villains,” calling their attacks “a clear threat not only to Israel, but also to international peace and security.”

Using military force against Israel also helps the Houthis evade challenges on the domestic front, Mr. Nagi said. As Yemen’s civil war moves to a new phase, they are facing pressure from people asking for basic public services or for their long-delayed salaries as civil servants to be paid, he said.

While it is not the only reason behind their attacks, “this is a way out from that dilemma,” Mr. Nagi said. Now the message is essentially: “Don’t speak about anything, because we are in a war,” he said.

Shuaib Almosawa contributed reporting from New Delhi and Talya Minsberg from Tel Aviv.

— Vivian Nereim reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

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A Yemeni militia backed by Iran struck a commercial vessel with a missile in the Red Sea on Tuesday, U.S. officials said, fanning concerns that the war in Gaza could balloon into a wider regional conflict.

The Strinda, a Norwegian tanker, caught fire after being hit by a cruise missile launched from a part of Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia, the U.S. military said. While no one was reported injured, it appeared to be one of the first successful strikes on a ship after weeks of threats by the Houthis, who have promised to hit vessels and shut down the waterway in protest of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

The Houthis, who have launched several drone and missile attacks on Israeli and American targets in recent weeks, said early Tuesday that they struck the Strinda because it was carrying oil to Israel. But the shipping company that owns the vessel said it was carrying feedstock for biofuel and had been bound for Italy. While the Houthis have said they intend to stop Israeli ships from sailing in the Red Sea, some of its prior targets have had no clear connection to Israel.

The attack underlined concerns that the war in Gaza, now in its third month, could draw in other armed groups that, like Hamas, are adversaries of Israel and supported by Iran. In recent days, Israeli leaders have hinted at escalating the conflict with the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah, with Benny Gantz, a member of the Israeli war cabinet, warning on Monday that the group’s intensifying cross-border strikes “demand of Israel to remove such a threat.”

Militias supported by Iran have warned of broader attacks against Israel unless it stops its assault in Gaza, which has killed at least 15,000 people, and likely thousands more, according to Gazan health authorities. Since the conflict began on Oct. 7, when Hamas, which controls Gaza, killed some 1,200 people in Israel, diplomats from the United States, Qatar and other Middle East countries have worked to limit the fallout from the war, increase humanitarian aid to Gazans and negotiate pauses in the fighting.

A weeklong truce, during which hostages held by Hamas were exchanged for Palestinians detained by Israel, ended on Dec. 1, dampening hopes for a longer cease-fire. The resumption of fighting renewed fears that militias tied to Iran would step up their attacks on Israel.

So far, most missiles and drones fired by the Houthis have been intercepted by U.S. naval forces stationed in the area or have fallen off course.

On Monday evening, the Strinda came under fire in “a complex aerial attack from Yemen,” according to a statement from the French Defense Ministry, which said that its Languedoc frigate, which was patrolling the area, intercepted a drone that directly threatened the Norwegian vessel.

The French ship then moved closer to prevent an “attempted hijacking,” the statement said. A U.S. Navy ship, the U.S.S. Mason, responded to the Strinda’s mayday call and was at the scene of the attack rendering aid, the U.S. military said.

The French vessel arrived in the southern Red Sea last week to help patrol a waterway that is vital for global shipping, with more than 20,000 commercial vessels transiting the sea every year. Experts say unrest in the narrow Bab al-Mandab strait — which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and is flanked by Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea — poses a threat to global shipping and supply chains.

“These attacks have the potential to become far more of a global strategic economic threat than simply a regional geopolitical one,” Duncan Potts, a retired vice admiral in Britain’s Royal Navy, said in a statement.

Yan Zhuang, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Eric Schmitt and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
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Behind the battle that claimed nine Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza Strip

The soldiers killed in Shujaiyeh fell victim to a coordinated ambush that began when terrorist militants fired on an IDF force operating in the area. Once concern arose that they might be abducted to nearby tunnels, another force arrived to extract the soldiers and encountered a similar ambush

Ten Israeli soldiers were killed in battles in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Nine of them were killed in combat in the neighborhood of Shujaiyeh: Seven of them from the Golani Brigade, and two from the 669 Search and Rescue Unit.

Another soldier from the combat engineering corps was killed in a separate battle in a different part of the northern Gaza Strip.

Shujaiyeh

Four other soldiers were severely wounded in the battles: one of them in the Shujaiyeh battle, and three others were injured in confrontations in other areas within the Gaza Strip.

The soldiers killed in Shujaiyeh fell victim to a coordinated ambush that began when terrorist militants fired on a Golani force operating in the area.

As the soldiers approached the building they were fired upon, gunfire erupted, followed by an explosive charge and grenades hurled at them. Four of the soldiers were injured, losing communication. Concern arose that they might be abducted to nearby tunnels.

Another force arrived to extract the soldiers and encountered a similar ambush, facing gunfire and explosive charges. A third force attempting to locate the stranded soldiers also faced combat. The battles persisted until the soldiers were rescued with the assistance of air support and artillery.

The soldiers killed from the Golani are Tomer Grinberg, 35, from Almog, and the commander of the Golani Brigade's 13th Battalion; Major Roei Meldas, 23, from Afula; Major Moshe Avram Bar On, 23, from Ra'anana; Sergeant Achia Daskal, 19, from Haifa; Captain Liel Hayo, 22, from Shoham; Col. (res.) Itzhak Ben Basat, 44, from Sde Ya'avok; Sgt. Eran Aloni, 19, from Ofakim.Itzhak Ben BasatCredit: Binyamin Regional CouncilI

Those killed from unit 669 are Major Ben Shelly, 26, from Kidron; Rom Hecht, 20, from Givatayim.

From the Combat Engineering force, Sergeant Oriya Yaakov, 19, from Ashkelon, a soldier in Battalion 614, was killed.

Since the beginning of the war, dozens of fighters from the 13th Battalion under Greenberg's command have been killed.

A month ago, Greenberg spoke about his soldiers: "They've been saying lately that they'll be the Yom Kippur War generation 2. We must remember that after the surprise, the Yom Kippur War generation attacked and won. Not in the first attack, but in the second counter-attack, they triumphed. We will also finish like that."

Greenberg recounted the battle where his soldiers rescued Roee and Guy Berdichevsky, ten-month-old twins, from the October 7 massacre in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, after their parents, Itai and Hadar, were murdered.

In an interview with Channel 13 News in October, he described: "We arrive at the house. I burst in. I see a mom dressed in pajamas, shot in the living room. I rush to the children's room, see a dad lying with a bullet in his head. In a crib, two twins wrapped up, not crying. We lift them, alive, healthy, cradle them. We all had tears in our eyes. I thought about my daughter back at home."

Behind the battle that claimed nine Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza Strip

The soldiers killed in Shujaiyeh fell victim to a coordinated ambush that began when terrorist militants fired on an IDF force operating in the area. Once concern arose that they might be abducted to nearby tunnels, another force arrived to extract the soldiers and encountered a similar ambush

Ten Israeli soldiers were killed in battles in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Nine of them were killed in combat in the neighborhood of Shujaiyeh: Seven of them from the Golani Brigade, and two from the 669 Search and Rescue Unit.

Another soldier from the combat engineering corps was killed in a separate battle in a different part of the northern Gaza Strip.

Shujaiyeh

Four other soldiers were severely wounded in the battles: one of them in the Shujaiyeh battle, and three others were injured in confrontations in other areas within the Gaza Strip.

The soldiers killed in Shujaiyeh fell victim to a coordinated ambush that began when terrorist militants fired on a Golani force operating in the area.

As the soldiers approached the building they were fired upon, gunfire erupted, followed by an explosive charge and grenades hurled at them. Four of the soldiers were injured, losing communication. Concern arose that they might be abducted to nearby tunnels.

Another force arrived to extract the soldiers and encountered a similar ambush, facing gunfire and explosive charges. A third force attempting to locate the stranded soldiers also faced combat. The battles persisted until the soldiers were rescued with the assistance of air support and artillery.

The soldiers killed from the Golani are Tomer Grinberg, 35, from Almog, and the commander of the Golani Brigade's 13th Battalion; Major Roei Meldas, 23, from Afula; Major Moshe Avram Bar On, 23, from Ra'anana; Sergeant Achia Daskal, 19, from Haifa; Captain Liel Hayo, 22, from Shoham; Col. (res.) Itzhak Ben Basat, 44, from Sde Ya'avok; Sgt. Eran Aloni, 19, from Ofakim.Itzhak Ben BasatCredit: Binyamin Regional CouncilI

Those killed from unit 669 are Major Ben Shelly, 26, from Kidron; Rom Hecht, 20, from Givatayim.

From the Combat Engineering force, Sergeant Oriya Yaakov, 19, from Ashkelon, a soldier in Battalion 614, was killed.

Since the beginning of the war, dozens of fighters from the 13th Battalion under Greenberg's command have been killed.

A month ago, Greenberg spoke about his soldiers: "They've been saying lately that they'll be the Yom Kippur War generation 2. We must remember that after the surprise, the Yom Kippur War generation attacked and won. Not in the first attack, but in the second counter-attack, they triumphed. We will also finish like that."

Greenberg recounted the battle where his soldiers rescued Roee and Guy Berdichevsky, ten-month-old twins, from the October 7 massacre in Kibbutz Kfar Azza, after their parents, Itai and Hadar, were murdered.

In an interview with Channel 13 News in October, he described: "We arrive at the house. I burst in. I see a mom dressed in pajamas, shot in the living room. I rush to the children's room, see a dad lying with a bullet in his head. In a crib, two twins wrapped up, not crying. We lift them, alive, healthy, cradle them. We all had tears in our eyes. I thought about my daughter back at home."

Israel's military edge over Hamas is blunted in northern Gaza's crowded urban areas

The Shujaiyeh neighborhood in eastern Gaza City is Hamas' last remaining stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip and the site of continued intense fighting.

The Israel Defense Forces remain far from establishing control of the area. In the Jabalya refugee camp resistance has diminished somewhat in recent days. In other areas in the north, where the army gained control a while back, troops are engaged in constant search operations for tunnels, arms and hideouts.

From time to time, there are small firefights, which testify to the fact that the organization's fighters continue to operate in the area. In southern Gaza, the focus of IDF operations continues to be the Khan Yunis area and the territorial division of Hamas operating in the city.

The videos of fighting that the IDF spokesperson release reflect a complex picture. Soldiers coming back from Gaza talk about slow and calculated advances, which means a lot of their time is spent waiting for orders to take the next bit of territory.

The combat itself by infantry and to a large degree also tanks, takes place at very close range and in heavily built-up areas, only some of which has been destroyed. The built-up areas, together with many tunnels still in use, enable groups of Hamas fighters to engage the IDF, in some cases at a distance of just a few meters.

These conditions reduce some of the IDF's relative advantage in technology and intelligence, and raise the number of Israeli casualties. This is all evident in the footage released Tuesday evening, in which a soldier from the Combat Engineering Corps Yahalom commando unit kills two terrorists at point-blank range inside an apartment while being injured by grenade shrapnel.

The spectators at home must have admired the soldier's bravery and composure but may have also asked themselves if there wasn't another, somewhat safer way, to handle the danger.

The offensive operation is being conducted hand in hand with an effort to locate the bodies of hostages. Earlier in the week, the bodies of Golani Warrant Officer Ziv Dado and Eden Zechariah, who was at the Nova festival, were discovered. The two were killed during the October 7 attack and their bodies taken by Hamas to Gaza. Since then the IDF has been searching for the two bodies. During the operation to retrieve the bodies last week, two reservists from the 551st Paratroopers Brigade were killed, Eyal Berkowitz and Gal Eisenkot.

However, it appears that further progress on another round of hostage negotiations has not started. The Qatari mediators, and the other countries involved in the talks, have been trying to craft a new deal that would include the release of some of the 137 hostages that remain captive. The order of priorities are women, sick and injured men, and elderly men. For now, however, Hamas has not exhibited any sign of urgency in coming to a deal.

Last month's hostage deal had been critical for Hamas because it needed a cease-fire to recover and reorganize its forces. Now that the northern part of the Gaza Strip is already largely under IDF control and most of Hamas' fighters have retreated, the organization's leadership feels no need to act. Top Hamas officials have said in recent days that more abductees will only be released as part of an overall deal, in which all the Palestinian prisoners imprisoned in Israel are released. There are no signs right now that Hamas feels that its bargaining power in future negotiations has diminished.

However, despite the harsh conditions the hostages are suffering (more than 20 of them have been declared dead by the IDF), it does not appear that Israel's leadership is in any hurry to reach a deal. One reason is political pressure: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears the possible reaction of his far-right coalition partners to any kind of deal that is seen as surrendering to Hamas demands and disrupting the ground campaign.

Hamas' biggest enabler
An additional determination voiced by service members has to do with the enormous amounts of weapons and improvised bombs that are found. Entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip served Hamas as military zones, where it carried out, under the cover of the Palestinian civilians, its defenses against an Israeli invasion. The preparation includes wholesale booby-trapping of homes as well as massive arms caches.

At the same time, great effort was put into digging the tunnel network, the size and sophistication of which exceed anything Israeli intelligence had anticipated, alongside the manufacture and smuggling of weapons.

Most of the smuggled arms arrived through the tunnels between the two parts of Rafah, and it is not clear how much Egypt's deliberate disregard contributed to the smuggling industry. But the biggest enabler of the Hamas project was Qatar. The billions of dollars it poured into the Strip were meant to help the impoverished population, but in practice they freed Hamas from the burden of worrying about the civilians.

Moreover, The New York Times reported this week that the Israeli intelligence community recently discovered that Qatar transferred money directly to the military arm of Hamas, yet the Israeli government did not act to stop the monthly payments from Doha to Gaza City.

Netanyahu, who bears the main responsibility for this – and for the total Israeli failure in handling the Strip, for about 15 years – continues to confuse and mislead the public. The prime minister is deep into a political campaign, and his main message to Israelis is that only he can thwart the American plot to involve the Palestinian Authority in the administration of the Strip, if and when the Hamas regime there is defeated.

Netanyahu issues emphatic statements on the matter daily, alongside bizarre scorekeeping vis-a-vis his political rivals. Monday he was busy trying to prove that the number of people killed during the Oslo Accords process, over a decade and more, is similar to the number of victims of the October 7 attack (although it is not clear how such a numerical comparison serves him).

The prime minister's statement may perhaps give more clarity to U.S. President Joe Biden's remark, at a Hanukkah reception at the White House Monday evening, that he once gave Netanyahu a photograph and wrote at the top: "I love you but I don't agree with a damn thing you had to say." (The first part can be attributed to excessive American politeness.) Biden also said at the reception that Netanyahu would have to make changes to the composition of his government and warned of a loss of global support for Israel. Nevertheless, the president continues to justify the Israeli attack in response to October 7 massacre by Hamas and to oppose a cease-fire at present.

Despite all the somewhat contradictory statements, it seems that the lines of agreement between the United States and Israel are still quite clear. If Israel continues to accede to American demands, above all a massive flow of humanitarian aid to Gazans, the United States will permit the IDF's extensive operation in the Strip for some time to come.

Netanyahu was forced to back down, contrary to his previous statements, and also allow the introduction of a large amount of fuel into the Strip, some of which clearly goes to Hamas. But his latest statements, along with his refusal to engage in the diplomatic end game, continue to create tension with Washington. This will be expressed Thursday when Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is expected to return to Israel and the region for a visit.

Sullivan will need to address the quickly escalating situation in the Red Sea. The Houthis in Yemen attacked another ship on Tuesday, this time one sailing under the Norwegian flag, and threatened to entirely shut the Bab al-Mandab Strait to ships heading to Israel. The problem is not only an Israeli one, as senior IDF officials say. Some 13 percent of global shipping traffic passes through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the shorter sailing route between the West and the Far East. A determined international coalition will be needed to fight this phenomenon, as was done a decade ago in the case of the Somali pirates attacking ships in the same region.

Impact on reservists
As families lit Hanukkah candles around Israel, it was clear to see who was missing – hundreds of thousands of reservists who are currently at the front lines or on military bases. For more than two months now, the very unusual security situation has weighted heavily on the home lives of families, many of whom are now starting to face financial insecurity as well.

What combat soldiers in compulsory service and the reserves have been experiencing is very unusual. This is not just because of the warfare in crowded, dangerous built-up areas, but also because of how long the combat has been continuing at this high intensity. The stress on the reservists by next year may resemble the situation in the first two years after the first Lebanon war broke out.

Conversations with reservists indicate high motivation to fight and strong belief in the justness of the war. But alongside this, there are also signs of exhaustion and questions regarding how long the war will go on and the expected outcome. Also notable is their harsh criticism regarding the conduct of the government, whose ministers are busy pillaging coalition funding, and which has been horribly slow and incompetent in handling the needs of the many Israelis harmed by the war.

It appears that the IDF General Staff headquarters still hasn't begun to internalize the extent of the war's impact on the reserves and the many implications of this. There's an integral difference between career soldiers and reservists, and even under normal circumstances this is hard to bridge. But now, the IDF needs to get moving and plan its reserve deployment for next year – and to ensure transparency with the reservists. Without an approach that is serious, organized and fair for reservist units, there could be a crisis that affects the functioning of these units as the war continues.

As Houthis threaten ships in the Red Sea, the West stumbles
Yemen's Houthi regime is capable of paralyzing the most important shipping lanes in the world through the Bab el-Mandab Strait, posing an intolerable threat for the U.S. and countries in the region

At least one Houthi missile hit a Norwegian ship, three days after the Houthis in Yemen announced that they intended to target any ship on route to Israel via the Red Sea.

The ship, called the STRINDA, was hit about 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a strategic maritime passage which separates the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean.

"This is a Yemeni veto of the American veto," Daifallah al-Shami, a Houthi government spokesman said, in reference to the attack and the American veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza.

For his part, the Houthi government's deputy prime minister for security affairs, Gen. Jalal al-Rowaishan, warned that the attacks would intensify as long as Israel's attacks in Gaza continued. The Houthi army, he said, has sufficient weaponry and intelligence to follow through on the threat anytime it wants.

In fact, Yemen has a stockpile of ballistic missiles including the Tankil, with a range of 500 kilometers (310 miles), and cruise missiles with ranges of between 80 and 300 kilometers. It has also been firing short-range missiles from speedboats, which complement the drones that they can use to track ship movements and to send information to those manning the missile launchers.

Yemen also has attack helicopters, such as the one used to take over the ship the Galaxy Leader in November. Their arsenal also includes torpedo bombs and naval mines and most importantly, the Yemenis benefit from close ties with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, and equipment, weapons, technology and financial support from Iran.

The Houthis don't need aircraft carriers or modern fighter jets to paralyze one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. Their recent attacks were sufficient to spur maritime transportation firms to reroute their ships to the much trip around the Horn of Africa.

Attached File

In addition to its damaging effects on shipping to Israel, the immediate effects include increasing shipping costs and the cost of insurance against war risks. It also directly affects Egypt's revenues from the Suez Canal (which accommodates 12 percent of the world's trade and 8 percent of transportation of oil).

The United States, Israel, and the rest of the world don't have a clear response at the moment to the Houthi maritime threat. American warships have been cruising the Red Sea, and in August, they were supplemented by two naval vessels with a combined crew of 3,000.

France and Britain also have a military presence near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait – as does Israel. These forces have chalked up several successes in intercepting the Yemeni missiles and drones, but they still can't completely address the situation in the entire geographic region that the Houthis control.

The United States has been trying in recent weeks to assemble an international naval reaction force to deal with the threat, but the effort is proceeding slowly for the time being and the main partners that would be expected to participate – Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – have still not assented to the plan.

The Saudis, who have vigorously renewed their ties with Iran, are close to signing a peace agreement with the Houthis. In a bid to avoid a crisis in the negotiations, Saudi Arabia has asked the United States to show "restraint" and not to carry out wide scale military action against the Houthis as long as the talks are underway.

In May, the UAE quit the military coalition that the United States established to protect shipping in the Persian Gulf, explaining that it preferred diplomatic solutions to military ones. The Emiratis haven't been in a hurry to join the new military coalition, which could again place the UAE in the Houthis bank of targets. This all comes about three years after the UAE signed an agreement with Iran and withdrew its forces from Yemen, halting the attacks on the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi.

The United States has a major interest in putting an end to the war in Yemen – which pits the Houthis against the Yemeni government recognized by the Saudis and Americans – or at least to establish a long –term cease-fire that would foster reconciliation between the two main parts of the country.

But in light of the Houthis' frequent attacks on shipping and the threat to international shipping lanes, the United States is having difficulty coming up with nonmilitary solutions. But even military ones pose difficulties. One potential target, for example, is the port of Hodeida, which the Houthis control and through which the country gets 70 percent of its consumer goods and oil. The port was subject to a total blockade until April, when the Houthis signed a cease-fire agreement with the "official" government of Yemen.

The port is one of the Houthis' main sources of revenue, from millions of dollars in fees and customs duties on the cargo that passes through it. Inflicting damage to the port could not only result in the suspension or even the rescission of agreements reached between the two sides. It would also put a halt to the arrival of essential supplies that millions of citizens living under Houthi rule depend upon.

Of course, beyond strategic targets such as Hodeida, there are secondary military targets such as radar stations, missile or military bases – or concentrations of Houthi forces. But they don't consist of an organized army of the type that hitting their primary facilities would take out of action.

The major threat is that joint Western military action would prompt the Houthis to inflict a painful response on targets in Saudi Arabia or even Jordan and drag the countries of the region and the Western forces into a prolonged war of attrition.

Another way of hitting the Houthis which has already been deployed is through financial sanctions against companies and individuals associated with the Houthis. This month the United States imposed such sanctions against 13 individuals and entities operating in Turkey, Russia, the UAE, and Iran, but it's doubtful they will have a real effect on the Houthis' base of financial support.

In addition to their revenues from the drug trade and port fees, the Houthi regime takes a 20 percent cut on commercial transactions in its "country" and another 4 to 15 percent on surgery at private hospitals. That's in addition to taxes that are not provided for by law.

It's not only the Houthis' cash flow that's difficult to control. Weapons reach the Houthi region, mainly from Iran, but they're also smuggled in from other countries. And it's difficult to track and stop arms ships and land-based smuggling convoys.

Of course, the Houthis link their attacks on ships in the Red Sea to the situation in Gaza and to what the Houthis declare is their participation in an axis of resistance that includes Hamas, other Palestinian groups, Hezbollah and Shi'ite militias in Iraq. But the concern is that even when the war in Gaza is over, the Houthis won't forgo the effective leverage that the Red Sea provides them to achieve diplomatic and political goals.

Commentators at media outlets in "legitimate" Yemen also think that the Houthis' decision to join the fighting in the Gaza war through attempted attacks on the southern Israeli port of Eilat have been an effort to halt major domestic criticism over their continued failure to stabilize the country's economy and to supply the population's needs.

It's also in the face of deep discrimination between those who are close to the regime and those who aren't. Some therefore think that an American attack on the Houthis and their military institutions would only help the Houthis by giving them a pretext to harm their political rivals.

This is a constellation of considerations that an international protection force in the Red Sea should take into account. And it doesn't leave a lot of room for an effective, immediate response that wouldn't endanger international shipping even more.

Hamas used toxic substance to kill Nahal Oz troops on Oct. 7, IDF probe said to show
Today, 9:59 am 29

An investigation into the nature of the deaths of IDF surveillance soldiers serving on the Nahal Oz base on October 7 has reportedly revealed that they were killed by a toxic gas that caused suffocation and loss of consciousness within a few minutes of exposure.

According to a report published by Channel 12, the main findings of the investigation indicated that an unspecified but toxic flammable substance was apparently thrown through the entrance of the building which housed the surveillance soldiers’ command center. One of the soldiers at the entrance to the building attempted to extinguish the flames but was unsuccessful and the fire continued to spread.

“They set fire to materials that ignited and spread, which contained toxic gases that could cause suffocation in a few minutes or even less than that,” Channel 12 quoted the officer delivering the report as saying, and added that the estimated time of a few minutes was an optimistic one.

As the fire continued to spread, the smoke began to enter the surveillance soldiers’ command center, where 22 people, including many of the surveillance soldiers, were hiding. In an attempt to ward off the smoke, the soldiers soaked some paper towels with water to fill the gap under the door but it didn’t work and the effects of the gas began to take hold.

“The soldiers began to leave the room and search for an exit. They were coughing and some couldn’t breathe,” the IDF officer told Channel 12. “Some told us that they felt they were stepping on some people, they tried to pick them up, and with the rest of their strength tried to call to them. They were simply surviving and trying to figure out how to get themselves out of there.”

When they reached the emergency exit, however, the soldiers realized that the door was on fire, and there was no way of opening it or even getting close to it. Those who were still able continued to search for an exit and eventually reached the bathrooms, where a small window led to the outside.

One of the officers climbed up to the window and smashed it, allowing him, five other officers and one surveillance soldier to escape the toxic inferno.

The attack on the Nahal Oz base, located less than a kilometer from the Gaza border, came at the start of the murderous assault carried out by Hamas, in which roughly 3,000 terrorists burst into Israel by land, air and sea under the cover of thousands of rockets. They infiltrated more than 20 communities across the south of the country, killing more than 1,200 people and seizing some 240 hostages. Families were slaughtered in their homes in front of their loved ones and some 360 people were mowed down at an outdoor music festival.

During the attack on the Nahal Oz base, 15 IDF surveillance soldiers were killed and six more were taken hostage.

One of the soldiers killed in the attack was Cpl. Shirel Mor, 19. Speaking to the Kan public broadcaster on Tuesday, her mother Edna Mor discussed the details surrounding her daughter’s death and directed strong criticism at those she holds responsible for it.

“It wasn’t only Hamas who killed our children. It was the government, the decision-makers in the army, they were also accomplices,” she said, adding that the “baseless hatred in the streets for eight months,” an apparent reference to the deep societal divisions over government’s contentious judicial overhaul, also played a role in the failure to protect the country against Hamas on October 7.

Following Shirel’s death, no senior officers visited Edna to deliver condolences or to discuss what had happened, she told Kan.

“They are afraid to come to us,” she said of the officers. “So who’s coming? The ones who are new there. The really senior ones, those who are in charge of the border, don’t come. They send junior officers.”

“It’s not that they’re ashamed. They don’t have any shame; if they didn’t guard our borders then they have no shame. They’re just afraid that we will finish them off here at home,” she added.

Describing Shirel as a person filled with joie de vivre, Edna said through tears, “She was put here for twenty years to educate me, her father, and her older sister and older brother. She contributed so much at home.

“How will I live? I had her at 40 years old; I gave myself a gift. They took her from me and they are guilty,” she told Kan. “I want to take all the rugs out of their cabinet, they’re always sweeping everything under the rug. I want those who are guilty to sit in prison. I, personally, and many other parents, will not accept resignations… they need to sit in prison without rank and without a pension.”