Thousands of Hamas fighters are now facing a deadly shootout with the Israeli army as the disastrous war their leaders triggered is in its tenth week. Now out of their tunnels, those men are trying to cope with the increasing winter chill and heavy rains. There is little shelter for them, or for the bedraggled surviving citizens of Gaza, from the elements and from Israeli bullets and bombs.

War is hell, too, for Israeli troops, who are on the hunt, now engaged in house-to-house and rubble-to-rubble searches for Hamas fighters, who will be far more willing to engage in one-on-one shootouts in the south of Gaza than in the earlier days of mass bombing in Gaza City. Future historians will make their judgment on the stunning ratio of dead Palestinians in Gaza to the Israeli combat dead. Israel’s military leaders now assess that the majority of Hamas fighters will be dead, will be captured, or will have deserted by the end of January. But then what? If the religious zealots who now dominate the government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a day-after plan, it is not known. What does the end of fighting mean for the surviving citizens of Gaza?

The only sure thing is that the astonishing number of innocent civilians of Gaza killed or maimed by Israeli bombs has left a stain on Israel’s international reputation that cannot be ignored. The disparity, as a former Israeli military officer told me this week, “is something that Israelis will have to think about. I support the war,” the official added, “but the balance is not right.”

In a series of interviews this week, I have learned more about the current scenario. The biggest surprise has been the number of Hamas fighters in the south who have chosen to surrender to Israeli troops. An American official with access to sensitive information said as many as seven hundred Hamas soldiers, all thought to be motivated by religious fanaticism as well as anti-colonial resistance, chose to surrender, in lieu of being shot, in the past week or so. “This was not expected,” the official said. “Israel expected Hamas to fight to the end, just as America thought the Japanese would do in World War II.”

That total included a senior aide to Yahya Sinjar, known to be one of the masterminds of Hamas’s October 7 cross-border raid into Israel that led to the death of 1200 Israeli citizens and soldiers, as well as the capture of 240 hostages, many of them on active duty in the Israeli Defense Force. Sinjar’s aide, whose name I could not learn, was said to be in charge of communications for Hamas.

Sinjar, who spent more than two decades in an Israeli prison, is believed to be hiding somewhere in the south of Gaza and is among several high-value Israeli targets there. The official told me that there is sensitive intelligence indicating that officials in Iran and Hezbollah, the militia group in Lebanon, have accused Sinjar of “going too far” in the October 7 attack. Rather than grabbing a few Israeli soldiers to be used as bargaining chips in future prisoner releases, the official said, “Sinjar ordered an all-out attack” that was far more successful, both in its violence and the number of hostages captured, than anticipated. Neither Iran nor Hezbollah has made any overt moves to directly support Hamas since the war began.

Another surprise in the past week was renewed contact between Israel and the Hamas political leadership in exile about a possible exchange of Israeli hostages in return for the release of Palestinians now held in Israeli jails in the West Bank. At this point, I was told, there are 137 Israelis in Hamas custody and still thought to be alive. All were taken hostage on October 7, and as many as thirty-six of them are believed to be active IDF members, men and women between the ages of eighteen to thirty-one. Eight civilian women and two children are still believed to be in custody.

The official said that Hamas has expressed interest in “the exchange of ten hostages in return for the release of as many as forty prisoners now in Israeli custody and a 48-hour ceasefire in the war. Those to be released could include captured men” from the age of 22 and up. I had previously been told that in the earlier hostage release talks Hamas insisted that the captured Israeli males between the ages of eighteen and fifty were either in the IDF or in the active reserves and would not be released.

The Israeli intelligence community, the official said, “knows much more about the hostages than it lets the public know. A few elderly men and women who were grabbed and taken to Gaza without their medications died in captivity because of lack of medical treatment. An elderly woman who spent forty four days in captivity without her heart medication is now dying in an Israeli hospital because her condition became terminal while being held, untreated by Hamas.”

There will be payback, the official said: “The minute the last hostage is on Israeli soil, the entire [Hamas] leadership—political, religious, and military—will be killed in the countries where they live. Mossad is already tracking them, but killing them before the hostages are out is risky.”

He said that “the big problem” today between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government is not the war against Hamas, but Netanyahu’s clash with the Palestinian Authority, the much weakened agency still nominally in charge of the West Bank. Steadily increasing violence committed there against the Palestinian population by Israeli settlers, who are openly supported by the IDF and the extremists that now dominate Israeli politics, has triggered alarms in Washington. The official told me that “Bibi’s continuing campaign” in the West Bank “is complicating Israel’s efforts to create favorable arrangements in Gaza after the war ends,” and the violence has become a “huge obstacle” for the Biden administration.  

The most direct sign of Washington’s alarm came Tuesday during Biden’s remarks to a routine campaign reception for Jewish contributors. The president defended Netanyahu’s decision to go to war with Hamas. “There’s no question about that,” Biden said. “None. Zero. They have every right.” But he went on to attack the hardliners that now dominate the Israeli government, specifically citing Itamar Ben Gvir, the Israeli minister of national security, who has been given expanded authority by Netanyahu over Israeli police and the security forces in the West Bank. Ben Gvir’s support in the Israeli Knesset helped Netanyahu win a fifth term as prime minister, at a time when he was facing serious corruption charges—charges that are still pending.

Ben Gvir is a fanatic who has been arrested dozens of times and convicted at least eight times on charges of incitement to racism against Arabs and supporting a terrorist organization. Earlier this year, when asked about increased violence committed by settlers in the West Bank, he told a Washington Post reporter that American reporters needed “to stop getting things in the wrong order. There are individual cases of violence from Jewish residents against Arabs and I am aware of them, but there are thousands of cases of Arabs engaging in violence against Jews.”

Biden was uncharacteristically caustic about Gvir. “This is a different group,” he told his Jewish supporters. “They don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution. . . . They don’t want . . . anything having to do with the Palestinians. . . . We have to make sure that Bibi understands that he’s got to make some moves to strengthen the PA. . . . You cannot say there’s no Palestinian state at all in the future.”

The president pointedly added that he and Netanyahu “talk a lot. I’ve known him for fifty years. . . . He’s a good friend but he has to change. . . . This government in Israel is making it very difficult for him to move.”

The American official told me that the Israelis running the government today “are pissed at Biden and think he should have said that we’re with you all the way. ‘You got to do [in the West Bank] what you got to do.’”

The crucial question now facing the American intelligence analysts, he said, “is whether there is going to be a regional war” in the Middle East if the Netanyahu government continues to ignore the growing crisis in the West Bank. That question, given the prime minister’s ongoing legal predicament and the support he needs from  Ben Gvir and his clique, “is up in the air.”

“There is a lot of behind-the-scenes back-and-forth,” he added, on the
future of the two-state solution in the Middle East.

The IDF provides new details of yesterday’s tragic incident in Gaza City’s Shejaiya neighborhood, during which three Israeli hostages who managed to escape Hamas captivity were shot dead by troops.

According to a senior officer in the Southern Command, citing an initial probe, the incident began after one soldier stationed in a building identified three suspicious figures exiting a building several dozen meters away.

All three were shirtless, with one of the figures carrying a stick with a makeshift white flag, according to the investigation.

The soldier, who believed the men moving toward him was an attempt by Hamas to lure IDF soldiers into a trap, immediately opened fire and shouted “terrorists!” to the other forces.

According to the probe, that soldier killed two of the men, while the third, who was hit and wounded, fled back into the building from which he came.

At that stage, the commander of the battalion, who was also in the building where the soldier shot from, went outside and called on the forces to halt their fire.

Meanwhile, sounds of someone shouting “Help” in Hebrew were heard by the troops in the area.

Moments later, the third man came out of the building to which he fled, and another soldier opened fire at him, killing him.

The battalion commander then realized that the appearance of the third man was unusual, and it was revealed to be an Israeli hostage. All three bodies were collected and taken to Israel to be identified.

The soldier who immediately opened fire upon identifying the three men did so against protocols, as did the second soldier who killed the third man, according to the officer.

Still, the IDF said it understands what led the soldiers to do so.

In Shejaiya, the senior officer says the IDF has not identified any Palestinian civilians in recent days.

The officer says troops have killed at least 38 Palestinian terror operatives in Shejaiya in recent days.

The only people seen wearing civilian clothing have been Hamas operatives, often unarmed. The operatives collect weapons left behind in various buildings, open fire at troops, and then flee again unarmed to another building.

The IDF has also encountered several seemingly unarmed civilians in Shejaiya, who later turned out to be Hamas suicide bombers.

There have also been several attempts by Hamas in the area to lure soldiers into an ambush.

On Wednesday, in what was initially thought to be unrelated to yesterday’s deadly mistaken shooting, the officer says that several hundred meters away the troops found a building with spray paint on the wall reading “SOS” in English, and another spray-painted message reading, in Hebrew, “Help, three hostages.”

The soldiers at the time believed the building was booby-trapped, but now the military is investigating a possible connection to yesterday’s incident.

Immediately following the incident, the IDF sent new protocols to ground troops for the possibility of more hostages managing to flee captivity.

The scenario itself, of hostages walking around in a battle zone, was never taken into account by the IDF.

The initial probe was completed today by the head of the IDF Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, and also presented to the families of Yotam Haim, Samar Talalka and Alon Lulu Shamriz, who were killed by the troops.

Israel Found the Hamas Money Machine Years Ago. Nobody Turned It Off..

Agents worried as millions poured in. Hamas bought weapons and plotted an attack. The authorities now say the money helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 assault on Israel.

Israeli security officials scored a major intelligence coup in 2018: secret documents that laid out, in intricate detail, what amounted to a private equity fund that Hamas used to finance its operations.

The ledgers, pilfered from the computer of a senior Hamas official, listed assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hamas controlled mining, chicken farming and road building companies in Sudan, twin skyscrapers in the United Arab Emirates, a property developer in Algeria, and a real estate firm listed on the Turkish stock exchange.

The documents, which The New York Times reviewed, were a potential road map for choking off Hamas’s money and thwarting its plans. The agents who obtained the records shared them inside their own government and in Washington.

Nothing happened.

For years, none of the companies named in the ledgers faced sanctions from the United States or Israel. Nobody publicly called out the companies or pressured Turkey, the hub of the financial network, to shut it down.

A Times investigation found that both senior Israeli and American officials failed to prioritize financial intelligence — which they had in hand — showing that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the companies to Hamas at the exact moment that it was buying new weapons and preparing an attack.

That money, American and Israeli officials now say, helped Hamas build up its military infrastructure and helped lay the groundwork for the Oct. 7 attacks.

“Everyone is talking about failures of intelligence on Oct. 7, but no one is talking about the failure to stop the money,” said Udi Levy, a former chief of Mossad’s economic warfare division. “It’s the money — the money — that allowed this.”

At its peak, Israeli and American officials now say, the portfolio had a value of roughly half a billion dollars.

Even after the Treasury Department finally levied sanctions against the network in 2022, records show, Hamas-linked figures were able to obtain millions of dollars by selling shares in a blacklisted company. The Treasury Department now fears that such money flows will allow Hamas to finance its continuing war with Israel and to rebuild when it is over.

“It’s something we are deeply worried about and expect to see given the financial stress Hamas is under,” said Brian Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. “What we are trying to do is disrupt that.”

That was what Israel’s terrorism-finance investigators hoped to do with their 2018 discovery. But at the top echelons of the Israeli and American governments, officials focused on putting together a series of financial sanctions against Iran. Neither country prioritized Hamas.

Israeli leaders believed that Hamas was more interested in governing than fighting. By the time the agents discovered the ledgers in 2018, the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was encouraging the government of Qatar to deliver millions of dollars to the Gaza Strip. He gambled that the money would buy stability and peace.

Mr. Levy recalled briefing Mr. Netanyahu personally in 2015 about the Hamas portfolio.

“I can tell you for sure that I talked to him about this,” Mr. Levy said. “But he didn’t care that much about it.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s Mossad chief shut down Mr. Levy’s team, Task Force Harpoon, that focused on disrupting the money flowing to groups including Hamas.

Former Harpoon agents grew so frustrated with the inaction that they uploaded some documents to Facebook, hoping that companies and investors would find them and stop doing business with Hamas-linked companies.

Members of Hamas’s military wing gather next to a large model of a drone. One person is holding the hand of a small child.
Members of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, next to a model of an Ababil drone in 2022 during a rally in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit... Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the years that followed the 2018 discovery, Hamas’s money network burrowed deeper into the mainstream financial system, records show.

The Turkish company at the heart of the operation had such a sheen of legitimacy that major American and European banks managed shares on behalf of clients. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invested tens of thousands of dollars before the company was placed under sanction.

The Times reviewed previously undisclosed intelligence documents and corporate records and interviewed dozens of current officials from the United States, Israel, Turkey and Hamas’s financial network. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Israeli intelligence and security agencies have apologized for the failings that led up to the Oct. 7 attacks.

Mr. Netanyahu has acknowledged that his government failed to protect its people and said that he would face, and answer, tough questions after the war. He has denied, though, that he took his eye off Hamas. But he declined to answer questions from The Times about the ledgers or the hunt for Hamas’s money.

2015: Task Force Harpoon
Israeli security and intelligence officials, working from a secure compound outside Tel Aviv, spent years tracking Hamas’s money. By 2015, they were on to what they called Hamas’s “secret investment portfolio.”

Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State often use front companies to launder money. But here, Israeli agents saw something different, more ambitious: a multinational network of real businesses churning out real profits.

On paper, they looked like unrelated companies. But over and over, the Israelis said they identified the same Hamas-linked figures as shareholders, executives and board members.

There were people like Hisham Qafisheh, a white-goateed Jordanian who studied in Saudi Arabia and had a knack for finding political support. One of his companies won a $500 million highway contract in Sudan.

Then there was Amer Al-Shawa, a Turkish man of Palestinian descent who studied electrical engineering in Ohio and more recently spent five months under interrogation in an Emirati jail on suspicion of funding Hamas.

At the top was Ahmed Odeh, a heavyset Jordanian businessman with years of experience in Saudi Arabia. The Israelis learned — and the Americans now say much of this publicly — that Hamas’s governing Shura Council had given Mr. Odeh seed money to build and manage a portfolio of companies.

Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza, relied principally on Iran to fund its military wing. But Hamas wanted its own funding stream, too.

The Israeli security services operated a terrorism-finance investigative team at the time called Task Force Harpoon. It put people from across counterterrorism — spies, soldiers, police officers, accountants, lawyers — under the same umbrella and gave them a direct report to the prime minister. The task force even had an economic warfare unit within the Mossad intelligence agency that could covertly act on the intelligence it had gathered.

“We didn’t have any rivalries,” Tamir Pardo, the Mossad chief at the time, said in an interview. “No one got credit for any one operation. It just worked.”

Harpoon, he said, was “one of the most important tools the Mossad had.” It churned out intelligence to financial regulators, law enforcement agencies, politicians and allies in Washington, helping Israel win financial sanctions targeting Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah.

Mr. Levy, who ran Harpoon and its dedicated economic warfare unit, recalled the first time he heard about Hamas’s portfolio.

“One of the guys on my team, a Mossad guy, showed it to me,” Mr. Levy said. “What we understood then was that they had these companies to make a little bit of money and to use them as a legal platform to transfer money from place to place.”

Back then, the consensus among Israeli officials was that Iran was the bigger threat. It had nuclear ambitions and armed both Hamas and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. So the bulk of the task force’s attention remained focused there.

Still, Mr. Levy said the discovery was enough of a “red flag” that he told Mr. Netanyahu about it.

2016: Shut Down

A 2014 war between Israel and Hamas had left Hamas’s fortifications in ruins and its arsenal depleted.

Hamas, though, was able to rebuild. In 2016, Israeli intelligence officials noted that the group was obtaining GPS jammers, drones and precision weapons, according to a military document reviewed by The Times.

Hamas had added about 6,000 operatives to its ranks since the war ended, and the military had learned that Hamas was developing plans to storm Israeli communities and take hostages.

By 2016, Mr. Netanyahu’s government had begun pursuing a strategy to contain Hamas by allowing the Qataris to send money to Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu says that money was humanitarian aid. Privately, he told others that stabilizing Hamas would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

That same year, the new Mossad chief, Yossi Cohen, dismantled Harpoon as part of an agency reorganization, according to Mr. Levy and others.

Mr. Levy left government that year. A new group of intelligence agents and specialists from a few other agencies kept chasing the money, only without the organizational structure and direct access to senior policymakers.

This new group soon made another alarming discovery.

Up until that point, members of the team told The Times, they had estimated that Hamas was taking about $10 million to $15 million annually from their companies’ profits.

Then they learned, based on sources and other intelligence, that Hamas had sold off some of the secret portfolio’s assets, raising more than $75 million. That money, according to an Israeli intelligence assessment, was sent to Gaza, where it was used to rebuild Hamas’s military infrastructure.

The Israeli authorities have now concluded that this influx of money not only helped Hamas prepare for the Oct. 7 attacks, but gave leaders confidence that they would have the money to rebuild afterward, according to five Israeli security officials.

Exactly how significant that money was to the Oct. 7 attacks is unknown. Israeli officials have promised an inquiry into the intelligence failures that led up to the attacks, and new details may emerge.

But what is clear is that the Israeli government took no public action against the Hamas-linked companies. Instead, it decided to build a case to get the United States government to shut the companies off from the global financial system. But that would take time, and more evidence.

2018: The Big Break

Exactly how Israeli intelligence obtained the ledgers — whether from an informant or a computer hack — remains unclear. But in 2018, the team got the proof it had been seeking.

The documents were created by Mahmoud Ghazal, a man whom the Israelis had identified as the Hamas portfolio’s bookkeeper.

The ledgers spanned 2012 to 2018 and contained entries and valuations for companies that the agents had been monitoring in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey and elsewhere. The records also contained familiar names, including Mr. Qafisheh and Mr. Al-Shawa.

The documents were hard evidence of what the Israelis had long suspected: Despite what public records said, Hamas was in control.

“It was a big breakthrough,” said one official involved in the investigation. “Hamas could hide behind frontmen and shareholders, but the money always talks.”

The ledgers also contained coded entries that puzzled investigators, but one document was a sort of Rosetta Stone: “QG” for instance, referred to Qitaa Ghaza, or the Gaza Strip. “D” referred to Daffa, or the West Bank. Beside each was a large dollar figure. From this, the Israelis deduced where Hamas was sending its money.

This discovery was quickly bolstered by intelligence from Saudi Arabia. In mid-2018, the Saudis arrested Mr. Ghazal, the Hamas accountant, and two other men who corporate records show held positions in 18 companies in the portfolio.

Under interrogation, Mr. Ghazal confessed that the portfolio existed to transfer money to Hamas, according to records related to the three men’s arrests that were viewed by The Times. He also said that, just as the Israelis had long suspected, Mr. Odeh directed where the money went.

The two other men told their interrogators that they were shareholders in name only. Their stakes were actually owned by Mr. Qafisheh, the goateed Jordanian who had also been on the Israeli radar screen for years. Mr. Qafisheh, the men said, was a Hamas operative.

Yossi Cohen:  As chief of Mossad in 2016, he dismantled Harpoon.

The documents do not say what the Saudis did to elicit the confessions. The kingdom’s harsh interrogation techniques have earned it international condemnation.

The Saudis shared the materials with Washington, according to officials with direct knowledge of the matter, knowing that Washington would share them with its close ally Israel. The Saudi monarchy has no tolerance for Hamas and hoped that Washington would blacklist the companies, the officials said.

The Israeli team shared the ledgers and its intelligence with American officials in early 2019, hoping to encourage financial sanctions.

But then, nothing.

The Trump administration did not act. Treasury Department officials said that they did not delay any decisions. Issuing sanctions, they said, is a complicated process. And Israel, which was more focused on getting the Americans to issue Iranian sanctions, did not press for more urgent actions, both Israeli and American officials say.

“We have great people still who are trying to do this work,” Mr. Levy said. “But if no one at a high level is putting this as a priority, what can they do?”

2019: Turkey
Though the investment portfolio spanned many countries, Turkey was key.

The Saudis had made clear with their arrests that Hamas was not welcome. And the financiers had lost much of their Sudanese income with the fall of the autocratic leader Omar al-Bashir.

Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, has not criminalized Hamas nor has it clearly restricted Hamas’s activities in Turkey.

By 2019, Mr. Odeh was in Turkey, as was Mr. Qafisheh.

Mr. Al-Shawa, the Ohio-educated engineer who had been in Israel’s sights for years, spent 135 days in Emirati jails before being released in 2015 — without explanation “and without breakfast,” he told The Times in an interview. He returned to Turkey.

Mr. Erdogan was a major proponent of the nation’s building industry, which was good news for the company at the center of the Hamas portfolio: a real estate developer named Trend GYO.

Trend took advantage of Mr. Erdogan’s building boom. It brought in an investor, Hamid Al Ahmar, with ties to the president. And it reorganized itself as a real estate investment trust, which had Turkish tax advantages, and went public.

Trend’s general manager, Mr. Al-Shawa, said he had no real power at the company. The board, he said, made all of the decisions. He denied being involved with Hamas, but he said that he suspected others at Trend were.

“Do I have proof? No. But sometimes you just have a feeling,” he said. “I really didn’t care. Why should I? I was there to make money.”

Mr. Odeh and Mr. Al Ahmar declined to comment through intermediaries. Trend would not pass messages seeking comment to Mr. Qafisheh, and a spokeswoman said he and Mr. Al Ahmar were no longer involved with the company. The spokeswoman said the question of whether Hamas owned the company was “ridiculous and meaningless.” She said Trend was appealing its Treasury designation. Hamas, through its media office in Lebanon, declined to comment.

Foreign investors piled in. In 2019, while Washington sat on the ledgers, American and European banks held more than 3 percent of the company’s publicly traded shares on behalf of clients, Turkish financial records show.

There is no indication that the church or the Western banks knew about any Hamas ties at the time. A church spokesman said that a U.S.-based investment adviser, Acadian Asset Management, bought the shares on its behalf. An Acadian spokesman said the company had “complied with all relevant laws.”

While the sanctions proposal languished, Israeli and American officials now say, Hamas appointed a new investment chief, Musa Dudin. Unlike his predecessors, he was a well-known Hamas military operative who had spent 18 years in an Israeli prison for his role in deadly attacks.

Mr. Dudin, too, has resettled in Turkey. Mr. Dudin declined to comment through an intermediary.

Meanwhile, Hamas-linked owners began cashing out. In 2019, Mr. Qafisheh sold more than $500,000 worth of stock, corporate filings show. In 2020, Mr. Al Ahmar sold shares worth $1.6 million.

The company’s owners got money out of the company another way, too. Mr. Al-Shawa, in his interview, said that the board pushed him to award Trend contracts to a construction company that Mr. Qafisheh owned with two other Trend shareholders.

Company records show that Trend paid that company more than $7.5 million from 2018 to 2022 — one example of how Hamas-linked figures pulled cash from the portfolio.

Trend, in a written statement, said it had paid the construction company “in accordance with commercial practices and legal rules” and no longer has a relationship with the company.

The Israeli agents understood that Iranian sanctions would take precedence over Hamas but were frustrated by the delays. At their wits’ end, former Task Force Harpoon members took a desperate step. In June 2021, they uploaded some of the Hamas financial records to Facebook. The documents revealed a few nodes of the secret network, including Trend. It is unclear whether that was authorized.

The goal was to create a trail of online breadcrumbs for journalists, financial investigators and others to follow. The Facebook post generated a smattering of news coverage.

“There wasn’t any way to use the intelligence we had,” said Uzi Shawa, a former Mossad agent and Harpoon member. “It was almost done as a last resort.”

Finally, in May 2022, the Treasury Department announced financial sanctions against what it called an expansive Hamas funding network. Mr. Odeh and Mr. Qafisheh were named as financiers.

“The United States is committed to denying Hamas the ability to generate and move funds and to holding Hamas accountable for its role in promoting and carrying out violence,” the department said.

Trend was financially blacklisted, as were several other associated companies.

All had been named in the ledgers that the Israeli team had given the Americans three years earlier.

Late last month, Mr. Nelson, the Treasury Department official, flew to Turkey to urge the Turkish government to stop sheltering Hamas’s money.

“It’s the highest priority in our building,” he said in an interview this month. The department recently added Mr. Dudin, Mr. Al-Shawa and others to the financial blacklist. Mr. Al-Shawa said he was appealing the decision.

Mr. Erdogan has given no indication that he intends to recognize those sanctions. After the Oct. 7 attacks, he declared that Hamas was not a terrorist organization, but a “liberation group.”

Americans “are the only ones who set the law in the world and all others follow,” Hasan Turan, a minister from Mr. Erdogan’s governing party, said in a recent interview. “It is not acceptable.”

Mr. Turan even met with Mr. Al Ahmar, the former Trend investor, last month to discuss ways to support the Palestinians.

The value of Trend’s stock, which is still traded on the Istanbul exchange, has more than doubled since it was added to the sanctions list. During that same period, two Trend shareholders now under sanction sold $4.3 million in stock, corporate filings show. Asked if that money went to Hamas, the company’s chairman said he did not know and it would be inappropriate to ask.

And as recently as this year, Hamas-tied companies and people under sanction were still able to hold Turkish bank accounts in U.S. dollars, banking records reviewed by The Times show, despite ostensibly being cut off from the American financial system.

Mr. Pardo, the former Mossad chief, said he did not know what happened after he left in 2016. But “from the results,” he said, “you can judge that they had a lot of money.”

“I believe that if someone would have chased the money and stopped it,” he added, “we wouldn’t be seeing the results of what we see today.”

Mr. Levy, the former Harpoon deputy, grows emotional when he talks about the Hamas money. “I want to do everything we can to prevent war,” he said. “I really believed that we could do that by going after the financial infrastructure of terrorist groups. But we have to be serious.”

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting from Tel Aviv, and Patrick Kingsley from Jerusalem.

"Sinwar told me: One day I'll be in power – and you'll be the one interrogated'
The Shin Bet interrogator tasked with questioning Yahya Sinwar in the 1980s talks about his jolting encounter with the man who leads Hamas. The official predicts that Sinwar will favor a Palestinian prisoner-hostage exchange – but won't be captured by Israel

You can't introduce yourself by name, but maybe you could explain how you came to be an interrogator in the Shin Bet security service.

I was in [the elite commando unit] Sayeret Matkal, and during my service I met a senior figure from the Shin Bet. We participated in a number of operations together, and he suggested that I join. He said it was interesting work. I've been here ever since, for over 30 years.

You told me, 'We're working around the clock, because of the war.' Who are you interrogating?

At first we questioned Palestinian workers from the Gaza Strip, whom we rounded up from all over Israel after October 7. Now we're also interrogating people who have entered Israel from the Strip during the war.

What does a Shin Bet interrogator's day look like?

The day starts with a morning meeting of the whole interrogation team, a situation appraisal. The detainees who are to be interrogated are described; each case is presented. We plan together how it's best to go about cracking each one. There's brainstorming. Afterward, everyone goes their own way, to the interrogation he's conducting. Every interrogation is a whole world. It's like a movie that you create, direct, produce. You turn off emotions and delve into the story.

I'm familiar with the concept of turning off one's emotions, but I don't understand how it works. Is it possible? Especially these days. After all, you are hearing terrible things.

When I'm doing an interrogation, I'm super-professional. There is no emotion. I sit with people who I know have massacred, murdered, burned – so it's even more important to act that way. Naturally I know how to put on a show and raise my voice or stalk angrily out of the room, but that's just for show.

When was the last time you actually stalked out of a room?

Actually, I'm one of those interrogators who's capable of staying in the room even for a whole day. Look, I'm 60 years old, the interrogatees are a lot younger. There's a different approach here. I sit opposite a kid of 20 and soften him up with a paternal approach – not with rage.

Interesting distinction. Let's talk a bit more about that. What do you say to him, for example?

"I am your dad's age." Sometimes the interrogee himself says that – "You're my dad's age" – and then it's a lot harder for him to be brazen or defiant, to quarrel or be a smart aleck.

"I have been interrogating the same Hamas person for more than a week. He asks me all the time if there will be a prisoner exchange."

Do the people you interrogate frequently raise their voices or act defiantly?

Yes. It's a sort of way for them to exploit the situation. Since the 1990s and the Shin Bet Law [of 2002, regulating the agency's operations] changes were made in the interrogations unit, interrogators are not permitted to be violent, and interrogees know that.

Really? There is no violence in Shin Bet interrogations?

No.

We know the stories about exerting "moderate physical pressure." Are you telling me that doesn't happen any more?

It doesn't happen. Today all the interrogations are filmed and documented. There is a strict procedure. There is supervision by the state prosecution. There are exceptions, such as occurred, for example, in the story of the murderers of the family in Duma [including Amiram Ben-Uliel, a settler convicted of murdering the Dawabsheh family, who claims he was tortured during questioning]. In principle, there is no violence in Shin Bet interrogations, other than in cases of what's known as an "interrogation of necessity" – of a person who is a "ticking bomb" – but it's up to the attorney general what constitutes that sort of bomb. Like, someone whom you know is holding hostages in their home. Someone who transported a terrorist to an attack, as happened to us frequently during the years of the second intifada. If we catch the driver who transported a terrorist, he will undergo what you could call a very extreme interrogation. But those cases are examined meticulously beforehand, and authorization is needed at the highest levels: You can't just do whatever you feel like doing.

What do you usually do in interrogations? What is your strategy?

I try to create a connection with the interrogatee. He will never give you information if he doesn't connect with you – trusts you or "falls in love" with you, as it were. Or even is afraid of you – that's emotion, too. But there has to be some sort of emotional connection. Of course there are all kinds of situations. For example, there's longing for his parents. They talk about that a lot. "I miss my mother. I didn't get to speak with her before I was arrested." A top-ranking Hamas person whom I interrogated recently wanted each time to only talk about his mother, who doesn't know where he is. So I go with that, connect with him.

Are you authentic in interrogations?

Completely. I say true things and insert a few other details.

What, for example?

I tell him all kinds of supposedly real things about myself. He feels that I am revealing myself to him.

A Hamas figure arrested after the October 7 massacre. "An interogee will never give you information if he doesn't connect with you."

But that's not authentic, it's manipulative.

It's authentic. I don't feel that I am lying to him, I feel that I am connecting with him. But, you're right, there's a manipulative element in it. In the service we call it "a grain of truth wrapped up in a lie."

If someone who knows you well were sitting with you in the room while you conduct an interrogation, would he see a different personality or someone who's familiar to him?

There is a lot of play-acting, but I am still me. For example, one time I was with an interrogee when my sister called to tell me that our mother had been hospitalized. The interrogee asked, in Arabic, what the conversation had been about. I told him that my mother was in the hospital. So he said, "I wish her good health." After a few hours they decided to discharge my mother. I didn't hold back but went over to him – I wanted to create a personal connection. I told him, "Look, you said 'I wish her good health,' and God heard you and she was discharged." He was happy. I wasn't lying. I only flattered him a little, talking about how excited I was that he had wished her well, and that it had helped her.

You're describing a lovely human moment. Until the last part you mentioned, at least.

Very human. But again, I wasn't being completely real. You asked if there is authenticity, and I felt authentic, but not completely, because I had a goal.

When he sits across from you, what is he? A person? A goal? An object?

I give him the feeling that there is mutual trust between us. I get into his personal life, whether he's a teenager from Jericho or a Hamas officer from Gaza. I speak to him as one would in a regular conversation, and lead him gently to [talk about] his violent activity. But first I connect with the person inside them.

And you are able to stay with the person-inside-them even when they relate horror stories about their actions?

Yes. Now, for example, I have been interrogating the same Hamas person for more than a week. I've extracted a few big intelligence reports from him, mountains of information, because of the affinity forged between us. He's already asking to sit with me. I also plant hope in him – he asks me all the time if there will be an exchange of prisoners [for Israeli hostages]. He fantasizes that he will be returned [to Gaza], he asks me to check online about what's going on. I reply that in time there will certainly be prisoner exchanges. I realize that this is what he's holding onto, so why not say it?

It's also not a total lie.

No. Not that I mind lying to him. But it's dangerous. If you lie to him and he finds out that you lied, the situation is lost, you've also lost him.

Exciting the masses

Let's go back to your first days in the Shin Bet, at the end of the 1980s. Hamas was still in its infancy. And you receive an interrogee named Yahya Sinwar.

I was Sinwar's case officer in 1988. Actually, Hamas started out as something called the Islamic Society – religious activists from the Islamic University [in Gaza City]. There were power struggles there against left-wing organizations: the Popular Front and Fatah. This is the period in which the Shin Bet is said to have "strengthened" Hamas, because the Shin Bet did in fact prefer to have the religious [groups] act as a counterweight to the Popular Front and Fatah, because they [the latter] were the ones carrying out the terrorist attacks. Sinwar was a leading activist at the Islamic University. Everyone knew him. He knew how to excite the masses.

He was then a student or a sort of intern of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was released in the Jibril prisoner exchange deal in 1985.

Yassin was the spiritual authority. Abdullah Azzam, a well-known Islamist [aka the "father of the jihad"], who was the inspiration for many cells and organized efforts, suggested that Sinwar join a new movement called Al-Majd, whose aim was to persecute heretics. Yahya of course agreed enthusiastically. They communicated clandestinely by means of notes that they left in toilets at the Islamic University. "Dig at such-and-such a place, there are weapons there." There was total compartmentalization. Sinwar himself didn't know who his handler was; every week he would find a note with instructions in the regular place.

They were a team of four people, including also Rawhi Mushtaha, who is today also a senior figure in the Hamas leadership and is in Qatar. That murderous team maintained full compartmentalization [from each other], but its people reported to Yassin about all their operations. For example, they interrogated someone and taped the interrogation. Yassin listened to the cassette and told them something like, "God will not bring him back." From that they understood that they had a green light to murder. I remember that we examined that sentence in depth, to discern whether Yassin had or had not issued a command to kill. They abducted and murdered four or five people.

Excerpts from the transcripts of Sinwar's interrogations (he confessed and was convicted in 1989 of murdering four Palestinians who allegedly collaborated with Israel) were published in Haaretz on November 8 by Chaim Levinson . If I recall, Sinwar says there were murders that Yassin ostensibly gave his blessing to, and others he's not sure Yassin knew about. In any event, they were brutal acts [against so-called heretics].

Appalling murders. Sinwar was arrested several times in his life. The first time was in Jenin, for inciting to nationalist activity. The second time he was arrested because of the murders of the supposed heretics. He was sent to prison, and we pretty much forgot about him until the episode of the abduction of Israeli soldiers Ilan Saadon and Avi Sasportas [in 1989]. We realized then that there was a large, organized body in the Gaza Strip that we hadn't known about – a body responsible for the abduction of the soldiers. We had Salah Shehadeh, who was incarcerated, like Sinwar, in a different case. We brought him back to the interrogation room. He incriminated Sinwar, and then we also brought Sinwar back for another round of interrogation. By then it was already a different game, because Sinwar knew that Shehadeh had incriminated him.

That time he knew he was being implicated.

In retrospect, I tend to believe that he wanted to give me whatever he gave me [during the questioning] and be done with it, in the knowledge that he was hiding the big picture from me. He must have told himself, "Okay, so my squad and I will go to jail for the murders, but we won't expose the organization." In the second round of questioning, however, things got more complicated for him, because he realized that revealing the organization would be a truly mortal blow.

You're the person who sat across from him when he told the horror stories in the first interrogation? Those appalling stories – "I strangled," "I pushed him into the grave."

Yes.

How did he tell you this? Do you remember? His body language, his facial expressions?

He told it to me with total apathy. Without batting an eyelash. I'm not an expert, and I don't have the skills to determine this, but I think he's a psychopath. If there is such a thing as psychopaths, then he is a psychopath.

While preparing for this interview, I read remarks by the interrogator Micha Kobi, who also questioned Sinwar at length. His description really sounds like it comes from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), definition of an antisocial disorder. He said Sinwar is emotionless, insensitive and cruel, shameless, lacks compassion. That he balks at nothing. That he seems to be pleased with the murders.

I agree completely. He saw murder victims as people who needed to die. From his viewpoint they were totally superfluous in the world – how come they're alive, anyway? He brutally murdered a barber. Why? Because there was a rumor that the man had obscene material in the barbershop that he sometimes showed his clients quietly, behind a curtain. A rumor, yes? No more than that.

Did you succeed in extracting what you wanted from him?

Yes. He provided detailed accounts. It was really easy to talk to him about the murders, because he was so proud of what he had done. When he spoke I thought about us, as interrogators, about all the resources we invest to understand whether we are being told the truth. That was of no interest to him at all. He tortured someone until he confessed? Yallah. Murder is permitted. He took no one into account, including the people around him. Only he decides.

Yes. It was also no problem for him to inform on his friends. He sees himself as a supreme authority.

He considered himself to be a leader. He always spoke with head held high, aggressively, authoritatively. He was not in awe of the interrogator – on the contrary: He was defiant all the time. I can read you what I wrote about him in the first interrogation. I kept it. "Definitely an anomalous figure in his personality, wisdom and level of intelligence. Religiously extreme, a believer, one who is at peace with his words and his deeds."

You were impressed by his intelligence.

Yes. He is super-intelligent. And also educated."

That's unusual in the landscape of Shin Bet interrogatees?

Yes. Very. All the top Hamas figures involved in the organization at the beginning were unusual. Doctors. Engineers. Students.

I read a paper by journalist Shlomi Eldar that dealt in part with a security prisoner who was the first to talk about the importance of acquiring education in Israeli prisons, in the 1960s. He said something like: With the ignoramuses and rabble of Gaza it will be impossible to defeat the Zionist enemy. Learning is essential. Education is essential.

That's it exactly. The entire senior leadership of Hamas at that time had studied at the Islamic University.

What else did you see in Sinwar? What did you discern about his persona?

Very ambitious. Incredibly charismatic. Everyone he sought to recruit to Hamas did not hesitate and said yes.

Sweeping charisma is also an attribute of psychopaths.

Look, he suggested that people endanger their life, confront the army. People usually respond to such ideas apprehensively and attempt to evade the issue. But with Sinwar no one declined. Everyone he approached was recruited immediately and agreed to every mission. This is what I wrote about him after the second round of questioning: "A Hamas activist in every fiber of his body. A figure of a leader with the personality of a murderer. During interrogation he was characterized by cleverness, guile, with operative cognitive abilities that were manifested in his field activity. A logistics person, and an amazing organizer and operator in the field." To you, I'll say that he hates Israel at an extreme level, which was translated in our presence into toxic comments, spoken with burning hatred.

Such as what, for example?

He told me in one interrogation: "You know that one day you will be the one under interrogation, and I will stand here as the government, as the interrogator. I will interrogate you." I shudder when I say that now, because just think: This is not so very far from reality now. If I lived in a community near the Gaza Strip, I might have found myself in a tunnel, opposite that man. I absolutely remember how he said it to me, as a promise, his eyes red. How did he put it? "Our roles will be reversed. The world will turn upside-down for you." You could see how much he believed in himself.

And what fearlessness. Micha Kobi noted also that Sinwar often made threats in his interrogations.

He has no fear. He did not hide his thoughts about his intention to murder Shin Bet personnel. He told me, "I will murder you, all your colleagues in the Mukhabarat [Arabic for secret police]," as he termed the Shin Bet. You need to understand what level of psychological warfare he employed already then, as a detainee. He faces you and curses and threatens, and is not afraid. I don't know how that served him. Why should someone under interrogation do something like that? Even if that's what you think, what do you gain from telling the interrogator that you will murder him?

A grandiose ego that he must feed.

His ego leads him, without a doubt at all. From then until this very day. The fact that he was placed behind bars didn't harm his leadership abilities or affect his determination to take action against the Zionist enemy. On the contrary: In prison he simply kept working. He activated people, recruited militants. Scary.

Were you afraid of him?

No.

Were there other interrogatees who threatened you like that?

Not like that. With him I experienced moments when I felt that I was liable to lose control and do things that must not be done and get into trouble. I left the room quite a lot during sessions with him, which I don't customarily do. He's one of those interrogatees who could lead you into a corner where you get tripped up and fall, and I didn't want to fall into a trap. I think I understood that he was looking for that. That he saw in my loss of control a weakness, that if I were tempted to lay into him, he would say to himself, "Great, he's afraid of me." I just feigned indifference.

Did he succeed in surprising you?

In terms of his cruelty and hardness, yes. I hadn't seen people like that before. Someone who behaves and speaks so boldly, isn't ashamed and doesn't fear the interrogator, and tells you: "You are the criminal, and even if the world turns upside-down I will deal with heretic Jews like you." Still, I didn't allow myself to be taken aback. I treated him like a regular interrogee. "What you have, you will give us. Your commanders have already told all, and you will also tell all."

An interrogation, certainly of a person like this, is a mind game. How would you characterize his game?

He tried to play on what is known and what isn't. He told us what he knew that we knew, and was silent about the rest. I believe that the fact that we combined Shehadeh and Yassin as part of our large interrogation circle was the key, because their message to the [other] interrogatees was, "Friends, you took a blow, everyone will tell what he has to tell, and we will go to jail like big boys. We absorbed a minor blow, but we'll win in the next battle."

For the jihad is eternal.

They never stopped telling us that. Sinwar, too. He kept saying, "We see an Islamic state from the Nile to the Euphrates. There is no Israel." He couldn't bear the idea that there was a Jewish entity that has a state and a government. "There will be an Islamic state, the only law will be Islamic law. We won't necessarily kill the Jews, you will be able to on living here as protected people."

Sounds promising. Were there were also more human moments between you, like what you mentioned earlier? A moment of closeness, a smile, even?

Not really. For sure, less than with other interrogatees.

You know, I pored over many sources. Everyone who came into contact with Sinwar says things similar to what you said: that he's determined, that he's brilliant, that he's charismatic. The only exception was a comment by Betty Lahat, the Israel Prisons Service officer who was the warden at Hadarim Prison. She said Sinwar was a coward – that he incites and instigates, and then hides.

She apparently missed something. Seriously. Maybe he deliberately let her see a different part of him. I don't want to sound arrogant, heaven forbid, but in the Shin Bet there was a consensus about him as early as 1988. There was agreement that with his abilities and his character, we would hear about him as a leader one day.

That's an issue that's been coming up: If the Shin Bet identified all those capabilities, the high level of danger he posed, why was he released? Why did they make do with the criterion that he has no Jewish blood on his hands as a sign that he didn't really constitute a danger?

I don't know the answer to that. I simply don't know. I can only say that I am absolutely not afraid of releasing prisoners. It's true that they inflame things, but you can always get to them. They will not destroy Israel. Not strategically. They will not bring us down. If I had to make a decision today about whether to release all the Palestinian prisoners in return for all the Israeli captives, I would say, "Go for it."

Do you think Israel will succeed in getting to Yahya Sinwar?

No, I believe he will manage to escape. If he doesn't succeed in doing that, he will try to make some sort of deal involving the captives, in order to save his skin. Unfortunately, I don't think Israel will get its hands on him.

IDF uncovers largest-ever Hamas attack tunnel, near northern Gaza border crossing
Today, 4:59 pm 33

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday revealed the largest-ever Hamas attack tunnel discovered by the military, in the northern Gaza Strip, close to the Erez border crossing with Israel.

The tunnel, of which around four kilometers (2.5 miles) were uncovered by the IDF, goes down some 50 meters (165 feet) underground in some areas and appears to be wide enough for vehicles to pass through. It did not enter Israeli territory.

One of the shafts was found just 400 meters (a quarter mile) from the Erez Crossing, which until Hamas’s October 7 onslaught facilitated the movement of Palestinian civilians into Israel for work and medical care.

The IDF said that over the last few weeks, the Combat Engineering Corps’ elite Yahalom unit and the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade used “advanced intelligence and technological means” to uncover the “strategic” tunnel network, scan it and clear it of any potential threats.

A map viewed by The Times of Israel showing the route of the tunnel has not been permitted for publication.

The tunnel has several branches and junctions, along with plumbing, electricity and communication lines, according to the IDF. In some parts of the tunnel, troops found blast doors, which the IDF said were intended to prevent Israeli troops from entering.

It said the tunnel allowed for the movement of vehicles, and “many weapons” belonging to Hamas were found inside.

“Its width indicates that it was intended to have been used for vehicle-borne raids against civilians in the Gaza border communities,” said the commander of the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade, Col. Haim Cohen, in a video statement.

Cohen said none of the branches entered Israeli territory.

During the ongoing fighting in Gaza, Hamas has carried out several attacks against troops from the tunnel network, according to the IDF. It added that several days ago, several Hamas gunmen were killed inside the tunnel.

The IDF said that the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza has provided “a lot of information about Hamas’s terror tunnels project.”

With the announcement, the IDF also published footage obtained from the Gaza Strip showing Hamas engineers constructing the tunnel. The footage showed members of the Palestinian terror group using specialized equipment to dig the tunnel.

According to the IDF, the construction of the tunnel involved a team of dozens of Hamas terrorists “who came especially for its construction from Khan Younis [in the southern Gaza Strip] to the north of the Gaza Strip.”

It said the tunnel project was led by Muhammad Sinwar, the commander of Hamas’s southern brigade, and brother of Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar.

The IDF said the materials used to build the tunnel “have not been seen so far in Hamas tactical tunnels.” It said the tunnel-boring machines used in the construction had been smuggled into the Strip.

According to military estimates, Hamas has invested millions of dollars in its tunnel network across the Gaza Strip.

“Since the beginning of the war, as well as during these days, the IDF has been working to locate and destroy dozens of attack tunnel routes, as part of the systematic dismantling of Hamas infrastructure,” it said.

Last week, the IDF announced that soldiers had discovered more than 800 tunnel shafts in the Strip since the beginning of the ground offensive targeting Hamas that began in late October, some 500 of which had already been destroyed.

The IDF has also carried out a successful trial of pumping seawater into the vast network of tunnels beneath Gaza, a move aimed at destroying the Palestinian terror group’s subterranean network of passages and hideaways and at driving its operatives above ground.

Asked about concerns that the tactic might harm the hostages — some of whom are being held in Hamas tunnels — IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a press conference Thursday that the army operates based on intelligence it has regarding where it believes the hostages are located and that it will not take steps that harm them.

IDF forces have been battling Hamas on the ground in the Gaza Strip since late October. War erupted after the terror group’s October 7 massacre, which saw 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 hostages of all ages, mostly civilians.

In response, Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas, and launched a widescale offensive in Gaza. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has claimed that more than 18,800 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war. However, the number cannot be independently verified and is believed to include some 7,000 Hamas and Hamas-affiliated terror operatives as well as civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets.

It is believed that 128 hostages remain in Gaza, not all of them alive. During a week-long truce, Hamas released 105 hostages. Four hostages were released before the truce, and one was rescued by troops. The bodies of eight hostages have also been recovered and three hostages have been mistakenly killed by the military. The Israel Defense Forces has confirmed the deaths of 21 of those still held by Hamas, citing new intelligence and findings obtained by troops operating in Gaza.

Seven more soldiers were announced as having fallen as the IDF’s Duvdevan unit was among forces that had smashed through Hamas’s Khan Yunis Brigade’s defense lines.

The military has described Khan Yunis as Hamas’s remaining governmental and military “center of gravity,” following the fall of Gaza City to IDF forces in mid-November.

While operating in the area, Duvdevan troops have struck targets with precision missiles and directed air strikes. They also destroyed terror infrastructure and eliminated Hamas terror cells in the city.

The Duvdevan soldiers, along with engineering forces and the Oketz Special Forces canine unit, swept the area and uncovered a system of Hamas tunnels and shafts.

During the operations, Hamas fighters emerged from these tunnels and fired at the Israeli forces, who responded with fire, killing the terrorists before demolishing the tunnel system.

IDF destroys Hamas tunnels

The troops also found and destroyed a facility dedicated to drone production, as well as several rocket launchers aimed at Israel. During one of these raids, troops encountered an explosive device which exploded, killing Duvdevan soldiers Sgt.-Maj. Liav Aloush (21) and St.-Sgt.-Maj. Etan Naeh (26), as well as St.-Sgt.-Maj. Tal Filiba (23) of the Combat Engineering Corps’ Yahalom unit [the troops who specialize in tunnels].

The IDF announced the names of these three soldiers, along with Sgt.-Maj. Urija Bayer (20) who was the most recent IDF soldier killed on Monday morning. Bayer was a soldier in the Nahal Brigade’s Maglan Special Forces unit and a German Evangelical Christian who chose to volunteer in the army.

Another Duvdevan soldier was seriously wounded as well. The troops directed combat helicopters and attacked the area until it was destroyed.

Besides those soldiers, Sgt.-Maj. (res.) Lidor Yosef Karavani (23), Capt. Yarin Gahali (22), and Capt. (res.) Netanel Silberg (33), were also announced as fallen.

The military’s progress has been significant enough in reducing Hamas’s operating capabilities above ground and its rocket fire that the IDF Home Front announced a reduction in emergency rules for Ashkelon.

Almost all of the rockets fired on Monday were on the North from Hezbollah; recent weeks have seen a dramatic drop in rocket fire from Gaza since the IDF progressed on Khan Yunis.

IDF sources confirmed that Rafah is one of the last places where Hamas can still more easily fire rockets – and even that restive city was attacked this past weekend by the IDF.

Hezbollah has been conducting attacks on Israel from positions next to UN and Lebanese army ones, the IDF said on Monday, a day after exchanges of fire between the Jewish state and the Lebanon-based Iranian proxy.

Earlier on Monday, the IDF identified several rocket launches directed at the border coming from within Lebanon. The military also reported that previous alarms that had sounded warning residents of a hostile aircraft intrusion were later found to have been activated due to rocket launches instead. In response, the military targeted the sources of the launches with artillery fire.

IAF fighter jets struck several Hezbollah terror targets on Monday as well, among them infrastructure, a launch post, and a military site. Troops identified and targeted terrorists operating in an area known to be used by the terrorist group for military purposes.

The IDF later announced that Israeli air defenses had intercepted a suspicious aerial target that crossed in from Lebanese territory.

Lebanon-based terrorists also fired an anti-tank missile towards the northern border community of Avivim. The IDF responded with artillery fire.

On Monday evening, the army announced that since October 7, Hezbollah attacks have claimed the lives of five civilians and displaced some 80,000 more from their homes in northern Israel. These attacks, the IDF added, violate UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

The military further stated that the attacks have been conducted from positions near UN and Lebanese Armed Forces installations.

Meanwhile, suitcases with funds amounting to over NIS 5 million (about $1.3 m.) were found in the home of a senior Hamas member in the Jabalya area. Many weapons were also found by soldiers from the 551st Brigade in the Hamas member’s home.

Overall, the IDF struck over 150 terrorist targets throughout the Gaza Strip on Monday. In one instance, the 646th Brigade targeted terrorist infrastructure where many weapons were found, including explosives, combat equipment, and RPGs. A stockpile of mortars and ammunition was also found in the same structure.

In Khan Yunis, the IAF spotted a suspicious cell entering terrorist infrastructure and struck the cell, eliminating it.

Since the start of the war, the military has intercepted over 100 aerial threats, including drones and cruise missiles, the IDF said Monday, releasing new footage of the interceptions.

Hamas leader Sinwar said to narrowly evade capture by IDF two separate times

IDF troops have twice managed to reach tunnels in Gaza in recent days where they believe Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was hiding just before they arrived, Hebrew media outlets reported Tuesday.

Citing unnamed sources, Channel 13 reported that the IDF has primarily focused its activities in and around the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis in order to achieve its goal of assassinating Sinwar.

The intelligence information gathered by the IDF while moving in on the Hamas leader has indicated that he is on the move rather than remaining in any one place for an extended period.

The report said that during the manhunt for Sinwar, troops uncovered a previous hiding space of Muhammad Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing.

Sinwar is currently believed to be hiding in Khan Younis, after fleeing the north of the Strip by hiding in a humanitarian convoy heading south early in the terror group’s war with Israel.

On December 6, the IDF was reported to have surrounded his home in Khan Younis despite there being no indication that he was residing there, as he is in hiding and owns multiple homes.

Sinwar was selected to replace Ismail Haniyeh as the leader of the terror group inside Gaza in 2017. Haniyeh currently resides in Qatar and serves as the chair of Hamas’s political bureau.

Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel in 1989 for planning the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians but was released 22 years later as part of the deal Israel made for the return of captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

He has been accused of overseeing the preparations and planning for the October 7 onslaught, during which thousands of Hamas-led terrorists poured into Israel from the land, air and sea, killing more than 1,200 people and seizing some 240 hostages.

In response to the attack, the deadliest in the country’s history, Israel vowed to eliminate Hamas from Gaza and end their 16-year rule, and launched an aerial campaign and subsequent ground operation.

On Tuesday evening, IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the military had deployed an additional brigade to Khan Younis.

“In southern Gaza, in the Khan Younis area, we are expanding our operations, and deepening them. We added a full brigade and additional combat engineering forces for operations in the area, to improve our operations,” Hagari said.

On Hamas’s vast tunnel network and other infrastructure that the IDF is working to destroy, Hagari said, “We must dismantle Hamas, and it will take as long as needed.”

During a tour of the Gaza border on Tuesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel’s ground operation will soon “expand to additional areas” of Gaza, apparently referring to the Strip’s center or the southernmost city of Rafah, where Palestinians reported at least 28 people to have been killed in airstrikes earlier in the day on Tuesday.

“Khan Younis has become the new capital of terror. We will not let up in our action there until we get to the senior Hamas officials,” he said, according to a statement from his office.

Meanwhile, the commander of the 162nd Division, Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, said on Tuesday evening that forces have managed to “break the operational abilities” of Hamas’s northern Gaza City brigade, as troops gained full control of the Jabaliya neighborhood.

“Jabaliya is not the Jabaliya it used to be, we killed hundreds of terrorists in Jabaliya and arrested around 500 suspects in terror activities, some of whom took part in the events of October 7,” Cohen said.

According to military assessments, some 1,000 Hamas operatives have been killed by troops in Jabaliya. Another 3,500 Palestinians have been captured by the IDF, of whom at least 500 are suspected of being involved in terror, including the October 7 attacks on southern Israel.

At least 70 of the estimated 1,500 terrorists who carried out the October 7 attacks lived in Jabaliya, and so far 57 of their homes have been destroyed by the military.

The IDF said that some of the terror suspects who surrendered to troops in Jabaliya were holed up in civilian sites, including hospitals and schools.

Many Hamas sites, including training grounds, command centers, weapon production plants and tunnels, have been destroyed in Jabaliya, the military added.

The 162nd Division also located Hamas intelligence material during the operations in Jabaliya, which has helped further operations in the area.

Cohen said his division had “led to the dismantling of the military capabilities” of Hamas’s northern Gaza City brigade.

According to Palestinian sources, Israeli troops raided the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City overnight. The church that operates the hospital stated that the majority of the staff still working at the hospital were detained, and a wall at the front of the building was destroyed.

The hospital was the scene of an explosion early in the war that killed dozens of people and was determined to have been caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.

Don Binder, a pastor at St. George’s Anglican Cathedral, which runs the hospital, said the overnight raid left just two doctors, four nurses and two janitors to tend to over 100 seriously wounded patients, with no running water or electricity.

He added that an Israeli tank was parked on the rubble at the hospital’s entrance, blocking anyone from entering or leaving.

Israel has long asserted that Hamas uses hospitals inside Gaza for military purposes, and since the start of the war, the IDF has operated inside hospitals in northern Gaza, producing evidence to back up its claims.

The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip has said that since the start of the war, more than 19,600 people have been killed, most of them civilians.

These figures cannot be independently verified and are believed to include some 7,000 Hamas or Hamas-affiliated terror operatives, as well as civilians killed by misfired Palestinian rockets. Another estimated 1,000 terrorists were killed in Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

Israel Offers One-Week Cease-Fire in Exchange for More Hostages
Israel has offered a one-week cease-fire in exchange for dozens of hostages still being held by Hamas, Egyptian officials said Wednesday, as Israeli forces stepped-up operations in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, believed to be the hiding spot of the group’s military leader.

Israel wants Hamas to release 40 of roughly 100 hostages—including all the remaining women and children that the militants abducted from Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks—as well as elderly male hostages who need urgent medical treatment, the Egyptian officials said. In return, the Israeli military would pause its ground and air operations in Gaza for a week and allow further humanitarian aid to enter the enclave, the officials said.

Hamas leaders, some of whom were in Egypt for talks on Wednesday, are demanding a two-week break in the fighting, the officials said. The head of Hamas’s political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, and Khaled Mashaal, another of the group’s senior political officials, were meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials in Cairo to discuss the offer, the officials said.

A spokesman for the Israeli government declined to comment. Spokespeople for Hamas’s military wing didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The negotiations, mediated by Egypt, come at a crucial time in Israel’s campaign to eliminate Hamas—a U.S. designated terrorist group—in Gaza. The Biden administration and other close Western allies of Israel have been pushing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change tactics in the war to limit civilian deaths in Gaza, including by relying less on widespread air bombardments that have flattened entire neighborhoods.

Since the war began in retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed according to Israeli authorities, nearly 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian health authorities. The figures don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Roughly 85% of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced, facing acute shortages of food, clean water and a near-complete collapse of the healthcare system, according to the United Nations and humanitarian groups. Very little of the aid entering Gaza through Egypt is reaching areas beyond the border town of Rafah, the U.N. says.

Israeli officials say the country’s armed forces will conduct the war at their own pace and won’t be swayed from their goal of wiping out Hamas. In recent days, those efforts have focused on Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, where Israeli officials believe Hamas’s military leader, Yahya Sinwar, is hiding in the group’s extensive underground tunnel network.

“Khan Younis has become the new capital of terror. We will not let up in our action there until we get to the senior leaders of this murderous organization Hamas,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said late Tuesday, adding that achieving that goal could take months.

Previously a city of around 400,000 people, Khan Younis almost doubled in size as Gazans fled from the north to the south at the request of the Israeli military early in the war. Since fighting in Khan Younis intensified more recently, tens of thousands of people have fled it, many of them to Rafah, according to the U.N.

Netanyahu said Tuesday he hopes that through military pressure Hamas will be forced back to the negotiating table to discuss the release of the roughly 100 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.

“I will spare no effort on this and the demand is to bring everyone” home, he said Tuesday, after meeting with relatives of hostages.

Palestinians in Gaza are facing acute shortages of food and clean water, the U.N. says. Photo: Bashar Taleb/Zuma Press

Over the past day, Israel’s military said it struck over 300 targets across the Gaza Strip, including sites it said were used to fire rockets into Israel. Israeli troops are engaged in face-to-face battles against Hamas fighters in northern and southern Gaza, it said.

Israeli forces significantly increased the number of troops in the Khan Younis, adding a new brigade and more combat engineers tasked with dismantling the city’s tunnel system, an Israeli military spokesman said Wednesday.

“One of the goals of the war is to get to Hamas leaders and bring them to justice,” he said.

The spokesman said Hamas was using the tunnel system in Khan Younis similarly to how it used it in northern Gaza, with the group’s fighters largely staying underground and coming to the surface to carry out ambushes.

The Israeli military said it’s the largest underground passageway, about 2½ miles long, that they have found so far built by Hamas in Gaza.

During operations in the city, Israeli forces raided what they described as a Hamas command center used to store and fire weapons, including mortars. The Israeli military also released a video that showed a targeted airstrike against a militant carrying a portable rocket launcher.

Israeli officials say they worry Sinwar and other Hamas leaders could flee Gaza by crossing the border or through underground tunnels into Egypt.

“If they are closing on them in Khan Younis, they can move to Rafah. If they go there, it means they are planning to run to Egypt,” said Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national security adviser.

Egypt flooded those tunnels in 2015 to destroy them, but the job wasn’t finished, Nagel said. Israel believes Hamas was able to use the tunnels to bring in significant quantities of weapons in Gaza before the Oct. 7 attacks, he said.

Israel has placed a $400,000 bounty on Sinwar, according to leaflets dropped by the Israeli air force in Gaza last week. The same leaflet offered rewards for three other Hamas leaders, including Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s armed wing.

Write to Summer Said at [email protected], Margherita Stancati at [email protected] and Dov Lieber at [email protected]

WSJ News Exclusive | Hamas Starts Planning for End of War With Israel

DOHA, Qatar—Hamas’s political leaders have been talking with their Palestinian rivals about how to govern Gaza and the West Bank after the war ends, a fraught negotiation that threatens to put them at odds with the militant wing fighting Israel.

The talks are the clearest sign that Hamas’s political faction is starting to plan for what follows the conflict.

“We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not partisans of a zero-sum game,” Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’s Doha-based political bureau, told The Wall Street Journal during an interview at a villa on the outskirts of the Qatari capital. “We want the war to end,” he said.

The Hamas leader’s statement marks a sharp turn from Oct. 7, when the militant wing of the group led an assault that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Now, after more than two months of war, and about 20,000 Palestinian casualties in Gaza, according to health authorities there, Hamas’s political wing is talking about an end to the conflict.

“We want to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Badran said.

Hamas’s Doha-based politburo is, on paper, in charge of the group’s affairs around the world, including in Gaza. But the divisions between the politburo and its officials inside Gaza, which includes a military wing, have sharpened since the war began.

According to the people familiar with the discussions and an Israeli official, the political leadership’s talks with Fatah, the dominant faction of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, have created tensions with Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas’s military wing based in Gaza. Sinwar, according to those people, doesn’t want Hamas to continue to govern Gaza, but believes the war isn’t lost yet and says it is too early to compromise.

Sinwar, who wasn’t informed about the political leadership’s talks, demanded they be stopped when he found out they were taking place, according to the people familiar with the talks.

The U.S. has been pressing Israeli and Palestinian leaders to begin thinking about what happens after the conflict in Gaza ends. Israel has said it doesn’t want to reoccupy Gaza, but that means putting in some other security force.

Some of the options being considered are a multinational peacekeeping force involving Arab nations, which Hamas and the Palestinian Authority reject. Another option is a revitalized Palestinian Authority with its own security force.

While Hamas has long had a conflicted relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents Palestinians at the United Nations and other international meetings, Badran and other Hamas political leaders now say they want to join its umbrella of political groups.

“It will be a national dialogue,” Badran said. “We have always said the PLO should contain any Palestinian faction.”

The entrance hall of the villa—lined with the portraits of Palestinians killed by the Israelis—speaks to that vision. It includes founder Yasser Arafat’s second in command, Khalil al-Wazir; the leaders of two Marxist groups; and Hamas founders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

In recent days, Hamas has been secretly reaching out to the leaders of Fatah. Badran and other Hamas officials say the talks have also included Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza security chief with close Emirati and Egyptian connections, and former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Dahlan said in a separate interview he is in daily contact with Hamas.

“I am no friend of Hamas,” he said. “But do you think anybody is going to be able to run to make peace without Hamas?”

Senior Hamas political leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Meshaal have been directly involved in those talks, which on the Fatah side include Hussein Al-Sheikh, the No. 2 in the PLO, people familiar with the discussions said. Al-Sheikh is in charge of its negotiations as well as the top liaison to the Israeli government, and is regarded as a potential successor to Mahmoud Abbas, the current head of the organization. Al-Sheikh declined to comment. Badran said Al-Sheikh hadn’t met Hamas’s political leaders in Doha.

Badran said being part of a coalition would facilitate talks with the international community, particularly European nations reluctant to work with Hamas, which is under sanctions.

The Hamas political leaders in these talks indicated that they would be willing to join the PLO and support negotiations under a unity government for a Palestinian state within 1967 borders.

But Badran said that Hamas had no plans to demilitarize or change its stance on Israel, which it refuses to recognize, at least as long as the occupation continues. “The world has no right to ask when people are being killed,” he said. “It’s not logical to ask this question at this time.”

For some, Hamas’s outreach is a sign of desperation as Israeli operations expand and Gaza slips away from the group’s military control.

“The political leadership thinks that Gaza may be lost,” said Ehud Yaari, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They don’t believe that Sinwar and his people can withstand the Israeli offensive for long, so they want to make a deal now.”

Badran denied any rift between Hamas’s Gaza branch and its political leadership in Doha. “The leadership of Hamas, both inside Gaza and outside it, is in complete agreement on strategies and political positions across various issues,” he said.

Publicly, the political and militant wings of Hamas say they agree on the issues. A spokesperson for the militant wing in Gaza couldn’t be reached for comment.

For now, Badran says Hamas is seeking a full-scale cease-fire with Israel, rather than a truce, which would lead to talks to exchange all remaining Israeli hostages for all Palestinian prisoners. “If there is a cease-fire, our stance is crystal clear: We want an exchange of all-for-all,” he said.

Badran, who learned Hebrew while in an Israeli jail, said his impression from reading Israeli reaction online was increasingly critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly after the death of three hostages accidentally killed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

Badran said 60 hostages had been killed during the fighting in Gaza out of the 150 Israel says were still held hostage after the first exchange, and that Israel would need to negotiate with Hamas to get them out. “The Israeli army is not suited to retrieve the prisoners alive,” he said. “It can only be achieved through negotiations.”

But any power-sharing agreement between Hamas and Fatah might face opposition from Mahmoud Abbas, 88 years old, who has run the Palestinian Authority since 2005 even after his mandate expired in 2009. The Palestinians “have been deprived of any choice for long, long years,” Badran said, adding that Hamas had held talks with neither Abbas nor the Palestinian Authority.

Years of attempts by Hamas and Fatah to reconcile their differences and form a unity government have failed partly over Hamas’s refusal to disband its military wing. The two sides have also fought over the mechanisms to oversee and enforce national elections.

But the biggest obstacle to any agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas on governing Gaza would likely be Israel, which has consistently said its goal is to destroy the militant group. Asked about the possibility of Hamas joining the Palestinian Authority and playing a role in postwar Gaza, an Israeli official said the idea was “unrealistic.”

The idea could also face opposition from the U.S., which wants a Palestinian Authority security force to crack down on Hamas after the war and to administer Gaza, said Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian peace negotiator. “They essentially want the PA’s role as Israel’s security subcontractor in the West Bank to be expanded into Gaza,” she said.

Buttu said the U.S. is willing to pump more money into the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority, but neither side has presented a sustainable political framework. “There is a longstanding and continuing false promise of Palestinian statehood,” she said.

Buttu places the blame on Americans for pressuring the Palestinian Authority not to work with Hamas, and expresses doubts about the stated goal of destroying the group.

“They have always been part of the political landscape since their founding,” Buttu said. “It’s a fantasy that they can be eliminated.”

Omar Abdel-Baqui and William Mauldin contributed to this article.

New intel said to disprove belief top Hamas commander Muhammad Deif is near-paralyzed

Elusive Hamas military wing leader Muhammed Deif is in a much better physical shape than previously thought, a report said Wednesday morning, citing new IDF intelligence findings that indicate that the prevalent belief that he is paraplegic and nearly paralyzed is mistaken.

The report by the Maariv daily cited video evidence of Deif apparently found recently by troops in the Gaza Strip, showing the arch-terrorist walking, albeit with a slight limp. The report said Deif was walking on his own legs, implying that the terrorist was not using prosthetics. He was said to be seen sitting up in another clip.

Little is known of Deif, but oft-repeated reports in Israel for over a decade have described him as missing both his legs and an arm, the result of an Israeli airstrike, one of some seven failed Israeli attempts on his life.

The reportedly uncovered new footage also apparently showed Deif with two functioning arms. The report did not say whether reports of him losing an eye in one of the assassination attempts were also exaggerated.

However, the Ynet news site said that according to evidence found by IDF troops in Gaza in recent weeks, Deif does still sometimes use a wheelchair.

The report said that Deif was playing an active role in commanding the fighting in Gaza.

Unlike many others in the Palestinian terror group, Deif has lived his life in the shadows, and pictures or videos of him are extremely rare.

The Shin Bet security service “wouldn’t recognize him if they passed him on the street,” investigative journalist Shlomi Eldar told The Economist recently.

There was no official confirmation of the Maariv report, which was quickly picked up by major Hebrew media outlets.

Army Radio reported that the army was not surprised by the discovery. Citing two unnamed Israeli sources, it said the Israel Defense Forces has known about Deif’s condition for several years.

According to Army Radio, Minister Avi Dichter reported nearly 20 years ago that Deif was partially paralyzed. Dichter made the comment upon departing the Shin Bet, which he led until 2005. The strike reported to have taken Deif’s legs occurred a year later, but Dichter’s statement was the last official Israeli comment on his condition.

Over the years, reports have said a total of seven Israeli assassination attempts have failed to take out Deif, though some of them seriously injured him. The last two known attempts, according to the military, occurred in May 2021 when Israel and Gazan terror groups fought in an 11-day flareup known as Operation Guardian of the Walls.

The military has been put on the defensive regarding its knowledge of what is happening inside Gaza after major intelligence failures were exposed by Hamas’s shock October 7 assault on southern Israel, in which some 3,000 terrorists broke through the fortified border, murdered some 1,200 people and took over 240 hostages, mostly civilians, in the worst single attack since the state’s establishment.

Amid Gaza War and Red Sea Attacks, Yemen’s Houthis Refuse to Back Down

The militia, which has targeted ships it says are connected to Israel, has vowed not to stop until the siege in Gaza ends and claims that a new U.S.-led maritime task force cannot deter the attacks.

Dec. 20, 2023

When the United States announced it was leading an international maritime task force to confront attacks on ships in the Red Sea, it did not take long for the group behind the attacks, the Houthi militia in Yemen, to dismiss the effort as a lost cause.

Within hours, a top Houthi official was making the rounds on Arabic television channels, describing the militia’s campaign of hijackings and missile and drone launches at commercial ships as a righteous battle to force Israel to end its siege on Gaza.

Western militaries had already spent weeks attempting to deter the Houthis, so the task force announced this week was “nothing new,” scoffed Mohammed Abdusalam, the Houthis’ chief negotiator. And if the United States directly attacked Yemen, he warned, it could turn the war in Gaza into an international conflagration.

“The Yemeni position is clear,” Abdullah Ben Amer, a high-ranking Houthi official in a department that is part of the group’s defense ministry, told The New York Times. The Houthi escalation in the Red Sea will stop, he said, when “the Israeli war on the people of Gaza stops.”

Those words echoed the stance that the Iran-backed militia has repeated since the war in Gaza began two months ago with the Hamas-led attacks that killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, officials say, and the Israeli response: bombardments in Gaza that have killed around 20,000 Palestinians, officials in the enclave say.

The war has sparked fury across the Middle East at Israel and the United States, its main ally, catapulting the Houthis — a once-scrappy tribal group that controls northern Yemen — into an unlikely global spotlight. While many Arab governments have addressed the war through aid and diplomacy, the Houthis embarked on a fiery military assault, increasing their popularity around the region.

They launched drones and missiles at southern Israel and pledged to block all ships traveling to Israeli ports from passing through the Bab al-Mandab strait near Yemen, a key choke point for global trade. Most of their attacks have been thwarted, but last month, they hijacked a commercial vessel, and this month, they struck a Norwegian ship with a missile, starting a fire. Their attacks have pressed the world’s largest shipping companies to reroute vessels, disrupting global trade and increasing oil prices.

“The problem with the Houthis is it’s very hard to deter them,” said Yoel Guzansky, a former Israeli official and a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

The militia’s capabilities and apparent fearlessness have been honed by years of civil war. In 2014, the Houthis — who espouse a religious ideology inspired by a sect of Shiite Islam — took over the Yemeni capital, Sana. A Saudi-led coalition launched a military intervention in an attempt to rout them, but ultimately failed, leaving the Houthis in power in northern Yemen. There, they have created an impoverished proto-state that they rule with an iron fist.

Even Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who spearheaded the yearslong military campaign against the Houthis and once said that “no country would accept to have a militia on its border” — is uninterested in confronting them today as he turns his focus to economic development.

“All this reinforces their perception that they are on the right path and that God is on their side,” said Nadwa Al-Dawsari, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute.

Before the war in Gaza, the Houthis were close to signing an American- and Saudi-backed deal that could have entrenched their position and paved the way for a broader peace process. But the Houthis were also facing public discontent, as Yemenis grappled with a lack of basic services and civil servants went for years without salaries, contributing to widespread hunger.

The war in Gaza was a “dream come true” for the group, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow at the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a research group based in London.

For decades, the Houthis had anchored their ideology on hostility toward the United States and Israel, and support for the Palestinian cause. “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews” is part of the group’s slogan.

They have also become an important arm of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes armed groups across the Middle East. Analysts close to the Iranian government have said the Houthis’ base in Yemen makes them ideally positioned to escalate regional conflict.

Now, the Houthis have a chance to live out their narrative, Mr. Al-Muslimi said, adding, “They can actually go into a war with Israel.”

The Houthis have described their attacks as an attempt to secure the free flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, where more than two million Palestinians are struggling to obtain food and water.

“What is happening in Bab al-Mandab is nothing but an echo or a result of what is happening in Gaza,” said Mr. Ben Amer, the Houthi official.

Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, called the Houthi attacks an “important wake-up call.” He also said, “The threat will be addressed.”

Yet, the group’s motivations and history complicate attempts to deter them, Yemeni analysts say, a lesson the Saudi-led coalition learned during eight years of war. The kingdom and the United Arab Emirates faced international condemnation for their bombing campaign in Yemen, much of it carried out with American assistance, and for a blockade that helped push the country into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The threat of a broader regional war looms over efforts to address the maritime attacks. U.S. military planners have prepared preliminary Houthi targets in Yemen should senior Biden administration officials order retaliatory strikes, two U.S. officials said, although military officials say the White House has shown no appetite for responding militarily to the Houthis and risking a wider escalation.

The task force appeared to be carefully calibrated to avoid that. But as the war in Gaza sparks grief and anger among Arab citizens and puts pressure on Arab leaders, the United States has struggled to rally some allies.

Only one Arab nation joined the task force: the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, where citizens announced plans to protest their government’s participation. Oman, which mediates talks with the Houthis, will not push the group to stop its attacks until there is a cease-fire in Gaza, according to a person briefed by Omani officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

And Saudi Arabia appears to be uninterested in any form of escalation.

“We are committed to ending the war in Yemen, and we are committed to a permanent cease-fire that opens the door for a political process,” the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said in a television interview this month.

“Everybody is looking for a way to de-escalate tensions,” Tim Lenderking, the U.S. special envoy for Yemen, said in an interview. He recently returned from a trip to the Gulf, where he met with partners to discuss how to safeguard maritime security while keeping the de facto Saudi-Houthi cease-fire on track.

Even before the war in Gaza, however, there were signs that the Yemen peace deal that Saudi Arabia and the United States were pursuing faced obstacles, including tensions between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Much of Yemen’s south is controlled by an Emirati-backed separatist group that has openly criticized the peace process.

“The deal by itself is deeply flawed,” Ms. al-Dawsari said. “It is meant for Riyadh to extricate themselves from Yemen even if that means handing over Yemen to the Houthis on a silver plate.”

Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment.

In parts of the Gulf, some political commentators have begun to argue that it was the American policy toward the war in Yemen that helped the Houthis thrive, pointing out that as Yemen’s humanitarian crisis deepened and children starved to death, American officials pressed the Saudi-led coalition to scale back its operations.

It was only after the ship attacks that “certain countries changed their tune” about the Houthis, said Mohamed Bin al-Wazir al-Awlaki, who comes from a prominent family in Shabwa, an oil-rich region of Yemen that the Houthis attempted to take over.

A maritime coalition to deter the Houthis is ultimately “a call for a return to war,” Mr. al-Awlaki said in a recent post on the social media platform X. He complained that the decision appeared to have been driven by commercial motives rather than humanitarian or political concerns.

“It’s clear that even if the region caught fire, there’s nothing more important than international shipping routes,” he said.

One Yemeni government official said he did not expect to see a peace deal for his country in the next month or two. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media, he said international mediators would take their end-of-year vacation soon, putting peace efforts on hold.

Under the heart of Gaza City, IDF digs up a vast hive of lairs where Hamas’s elite hid

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — A central square in Gaza’s largest city that until October 7 was a humming center of Palestinian retail and commercial activity hid an extensive warren of Hamas tunnels used by the terror group’s top officials to hide from Israel, the military has revealed.

Among those whose homes or offices were linked by the network of subterranean fortifications was Muhammad Deif, the elusive leader of the terror group’s military wing, and Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas official in Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

Palestine Square is located in the upscale Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, an area that before the war was seen as the power center of the enclave’s elite, home to top officials from the terror group ruling the Strip.

“This was a bustling area, there are buildings here of wealthy people,” said the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, while giving a media tour of the area on Tuesday.

“There are other squares in Gaza City, but this is the main one,” he said, pointing to what the IDF has identified as a penthouse apartment where the daughter of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh lived, a community college, Hamas government offices, and a lavish bridal store surrounding what once was a main traffic circle.

The square — not to be confused with a similarly named plaza in Shejaiya where Hamas paraded some released hostages last month — has largely been ripped up by army bulldozers and tanks.

The center of the square now features a massive Israeli flag, along with a giant menorah used during the Hanukkah festival earlier this month. The surrounding buildings are all heavily damaged or destroyed.

Aharon said all of Hamas’s top officials, including Haniyeh, Deif and Sinwar, had either offices or homes near the square, with personal tunnel shafts to the underground network, linking their hideouts, offices, and homes away from Israeli surveillance.

The army believes the shafts were used by the senior Hamas officials to hide deep underground when the terror group launched its murderous terror attack on southern Israel on October 7.

The brutal assault saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists pour into Israel from the land, air and sea, where they killed more than 1,200 people and seized some 240 hostages, many of whom remain in Gaza.

According to the IDF, the tunnel network featured blast doors and living quarters, adding that in some cases troops operating inside the tunnels found stores of food and water left behind, indicating plans to stay hidden in the underground sites for long periods.

The underground network also allowed the top Hamas members to flee to other areas of the Strip as Israel launched its ground offensive against the terror group.

In a statement Wednesday, the army described the complex as an “underground terror city” with a “strategic tunnel route connected to other significant underground infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.”

The tunnels under Palestine Square, along with other Hamas infrastructure in the adjacent buildings, underline the deep entanglement of the group’s terror activities within the civilian fabric of Gaza.

“Regular homes of civilians, that people seemingly live in the day-to-day, but in reality, they are either a hideout apartment for terrorists, or directly underneath the building, they have meeting rooms, where all of Hamas’s officials met,” Aharon said.

The commander said Hamas’s tunnel network in Gaza, including the sections under Palestine Square is “long, big and branched.”

The existence of Hamas’s vast tunnel network beneath Gaza has long been among the world’s worst-kept secrets, but Israel’s ground incursion has shined a light on just how enormous and durable it is. Earlier this month, the army unveiled a tunnel built dozens of meters below northern Gaza, stretching at least 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) toward the border with Israel at the Erez Crossing, and broad enough to fit a car. A video found by the army showed Sinwar and other Hamas officials cruising through the passageway.

“They built the underground [infrastructure] over decades, which is aimed at protecting themselves, the seniors, not the civilians, not even the soldiers in this case — their terrorists — but their officials,” Aharon said.

Aharon said the tunnels’ electricity for lighting, air circulation, and communications was largely powered by solar panels from nearby buildings, which Hamas siphoned off from local civilians, further taking advantage of the population. The terror group also uses generators, and has power accumulators to be able to stay hidden in the underground passages for long periods, he said.

The Times of Israel and other reporters were shown several tunnels in the area of the square, some just a few meters from the main traffic circle, though were not allowed to photograph some of them due to security concerns and ongoing operations inside of them.

Aharon said, “It’s hard to believe that people who lived here didn’t see trucks and dozens of people digging… they all knew what was happening.”

“We were able to locate many tunnel shafts, which lead to many more shafts, and uncover large tunnel routes, which we know were used by very important people [in Hamas],” said the deputy commander of the Israeli Air Force’s elite Shaldag unit.

The major, who can only be identified by his rank, said around 20 “significant” tunnel shafts were found in the area of Palestine Square.

One of the tunnels, located inside a mixed-use residential and commercial building, was believed to have been used by Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing.

The tunnel featured an elevator that goes some 20 meters (65.6 feet) underground, and then a long staircase heading another 20 meters down, before branching off to other areas. According to the major, the tunnel network has multiple levels and various facilities used by senior Hamas members.

“It was very difficult at the start to uncover this tunnel shaft,” he said. “The camouflage was relatively good.”

The major said that intelligence information provided by the Shin Bet, along with evidence found inside the building and tunnel, proved “unequivocally” that it was used by Deif.

A wheelchair was found inside the building adjacent to the tunnel entrance, and another one was found inside the tunnel, thought to have been used by Deif. However, according to a report Tuesday, Deif is in a much better physical shape than previously thought.

Little is known of Deif, but oft-repeated reports in Israel for over a decade have described him as missing both his legs and an arm. He was said to have lost the limbs in airstrikes as Israel repeatedly tried to assassinate him.

The report by the Maariv daily cited video evidence of Deif found recently by troops in the Gaza Strip, showing the arch-terrorist walking, albeit with a slight limp, indicating that the prevalent belief that he is paraplegic and nearly paralyzed is mistaken. Still, indications are that the IDF continues to believe he uses a wheelchair at least some of the time.

Asked by The Times of Israel if the tunnel shaft with an elevator was surprising, the major said his unit had already found several tunnels with elevators, but “there were other elements that surprised us inside the tunnel route.”

In another tunnel in the area, with a spiral staircase leading down 20 meters, the IDF said a large explosive device that had been planted there by Hamas detonated.

Aharon said the army had already known about some of the shafts, but others they discovered on the ground.

“Sometimes the intelligence is just a small fragment, and sometimes it’s a large amount of information. But it’s all step by step, you get information, carry out an operation, and receive more information. But obviously in this area which is an asset [to Hamas] and they want to hide it, the information is limited, but as time goes on, you get more information.”

The entrances to the tunnels and other Hamas infrastructure in the area of Palestine Square, uncovered by the 401st Brigade and other special forces working alongside them — including Shaldag, the Navy’s Shayetet 13, and the Yahalom combat engineering unit — have already provided much-needed intel to the IDF, the army says.

“During the raids on the sites we’ve managed to obtain accurate intelligence, which lead us to many other areas, and we will reach all of them,” the major said.

“We are advancing slowly but safely, persistently destroying them, but not rushing, so we can obtain our main goals of destroying Hamas’s rule and returning the hostages,” he added.

Fighting continues despite operational control

Ceaseless explosions from airstrikes and tank shelling were heard throughout the entire visit to Palestine Square, which was conducted under the tight control of the army. The blasts signaled that despite the operational control the IDF has over the area, troops were still battling smaller Hamas cells.

The media tour to the heart of Gaza City was initially delayed by several hours after troops encountered a Hamas cell on one of the roads the reporters were supposed to drive through. The drive to Palestine Square was also supposed to be in an open-top humvee, but mid-way through the journey the reporters swapped into a heavily armored Namer armored personnel carrier.

“We spotted a lookout on the roof of a building and three terrorists moving between the buildings,” Aharon said after we arrived, adding that a drone strike was carried out against the operative on the roof, and tanks shelled the other three.

In another incident during the visit, troops of the Combat Engineering Corps’ elite Yahalom unit killed three Hamas gunmen in the area, bringing back their weapons and equipment to show the reporters.

During the 401st Brigade’s battles against Hamas over Rimal’s Palestine Square during the past week and a half, some 600 terror operatives were killed by troops and in airstrikes, according to the IDF.

Though their underground lairs are now in the IDF’s hands and their aboveground homes and offices piles of rubble, Hamas’s leaders remain at large, even as pressure builds for Israel to wind down the current phase of the war and shift its offensive into low gear.

Speaking to The Times of Israel from a rooftop overlooking the once-simmering square, Aharon admitted that dismantling Hamas, as Israel has vowed to do following the October 7 massacres, “will take time.”

“I don’t know how long it will take, but every time you reach an area you discover more [Hamas] assets, and we want to destroy them, discover more enemies who we want to kill, and therefore, to defeat an enemy it takes time,” he said. “But relatively, in the time we’ve been here, we’ve achieved a lot.”

As the sun began to set over Gaza City, troops detonated a large cache of weapons and explosives uncovered in a nearby residential building, setting the structure up in flames, and covering Palestine Square in a thick layer of black smoke.

By now, evidence that Gaza’s terrorists hid arms where civilians once tried to live their lives should be far from shocking, but Aharon was still disturbed by the discovery.

“Their cruelty is always surprising,” he said. “A very cruel enemy against [its own people] and us, we saw this on October 7, but it’s surprising every time.”

Hamas Rejection Sours Israeli Bid to Revive Hostage Talks
Hamas rejected an Israeli offer to stop fighting for one week in exchange for dozens of hostages, saying the group wouldn’t discuss releasing their Israeli captives until a cease-fire first goes into effect, Egyptian officials said.

The head of Hamas’s political wing, Ismail Haniyeh, who met with intelligence officials in Cairo on Wednesday to discuss the offer, said that he was there to obtain a cease-fire and more humanitarian aid for Gaza, the Egyptian officials said.

Israel had made the offer as Israeli forces stepped up operations in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, believed to be the hiding place of Hamas’s military leadership.

The hostage negotiations were set to include, for the first time, representatives of Hamas ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has also said that Israel must implement a cease-fire before negotiations could start. Islamic Jihad also demands that Israel free all of its thousands of Palestinian prisoners in return for the over 100 hostages remaining in Gaza.

Fighters belonging to Islamic Jihad, which like Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., also participated in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and took hostages.

Hamas-affiliated fighters during the handover of released hostages to the Red Cross last month in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, as part of a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel .Photo: Stringer/Zuma Press
In the offer rejected by Hamas, Israel sought the release of 40 hostages, including all the remaining women and children and elderly male hostages who need urgent medical treatment, the Egyptian officials said. In return, the Israeli military would pause its ground and air operations in Gaza for a week and allow further humanitarian aid to enter the enclave, the Egyptian officials said.

The officials said the Hamas rejection didn’t represent a failure in the negotiations, but rather an effort to pressure Israel to offer more concessions. Hamas’s military wing didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the Israeli government declined to comment.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had said Wednesday that a pause in fighting in exchange for the release of hostages is “something we’d very much like to see happen.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that he hoped that military pressure would force Hamas back to the negotiating table.

“I will spare no effort on this, and the demand is to bring everyone” home, he said after meeting with relatives of hostages. There are 108 hostages still alive in Gaza, according to Israel, including 19 women and two children.

Netanyahu has said that military pressure was key to a November cease-fire deal during which Hamas released 105 of the roughly 240 hostages. Fighting resumed on Dec. 1, after a one-week pause, when Hamas was unable to produce a list of women and children to be released next.

Hamas has said that not all hostages are under its control—a claim that could explain the potential participation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the current discussions. A spokesman for Islamic Jihad said Wednesday that a delegation would travel to Cairo in the coming days.

Hamas has said that three hostages on Israel’s list—Shiri Bibas, 32 years old, and her children, 4-year-old Ariel and ten-month-old Kfir, the last remaining child hostages in Gaza—were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Israel says it hasn’t confirmed that the three are dead.

The Biden administration and other Western allies of Israel have been pushing Netanyahu to change tactics in the war to limit civilian deaths in Gaza, including by relying less on air bombardments that have flattened entire neighborhoods.

Since the war began in retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed, according to Israeli authorities, 20,000 people have been killed in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to Palestinian authorities. The Gaza figures don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Palestinians mourn relatives killed in the fighting, outside a morgue in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on Wednesday.Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg News
Roughly 85% of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are displaced within the enclave, facing acute shortages of food, clean water and a near-complete collapse of the healthcare system, according to the United Nations and humanitarian groups. Very little of the aid entering Gaza through Egypt is reaching areas beyond the border town of Rafah, the U.N. says.

The U.N. Security Council is considering a United Arab Emirates-led resolution that would seek to allow more humanitarian aid to Gaza and to reduce or pause Israel’s military operations there, diplomats said. The U.S., which recently vetoed another resolution on Israel, supports the goal of getting humanitarian aid to Gaza, Blinken said Wednesday.

“We want to make sure that the resolution in what it calls for and requires, actually advances that effort and doesn’t do anything that can actually hurt the delivery of humanitarian assistance,” he told reporters in Washington.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestine territories’ representative to the United Nations, third from right, during a break from a meeting at the U.N. on the Israel-Hamas war on Tuesday.Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Israeli officials say the country’s armed forces will conduct the war at their own pace and won’t be swayed from their goal of wiping out Hamas. In recent days, those efforts have focused on Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city, where Israeli officials say they believe Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is hiding in the group’s extensive underground tunnel network.

“Khan Younis has become the new capital of terror. We will not let up in our action there until we get to the senior leaders of this murderous organization Hamas,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said late Tuesday, adding that achieving that goal could take months.

Previously a city of around 400,000 people, Khan Younis almost doubled in size as Gazans fled from the north to the south at the request of the Israeli military early in the war. Since fighting in Khan Younis intensified more recently, tens of thousands of people have fled the city, many of them to Rafah, according to the U.N.

Palestinians searched through rubble in Rafah after a house was hit Wednesday. Photo: Fatima Shbair/Associated Press
Israel’s military said Wednesday it struck over 300 targets across the Gaza Strip in the past day, including sites it said were used to fire rockets into Israel. Israeli troops are engaged in face-to-face battles against Hamas fighters in northern and southern Gaza.

The Israeli military also said that it had secured a large tunnel complex in the center of Gaza City, which it said was used by Hamas senior leadership to direct operations.

An Israeli military spokesman said Hamas was using the tunnel system in Khan Younis similarly to how it used it in northern Gaza, with the group’s fighters largely staying underground and coming to the surface to carry out ambushes.

Israeli officials say they worry Sinwar and other Hamas leaders could flee Gaza by crossing the border or through underground tunnels into Egypt.

“If they are closing on them in Khan Younis, they can move to Rafah. If they go there, it means they are planning to run to Egypt,” said Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national security adviser.

Israel believes Hamas was able to use the tunnels to bring in significant quantities of weapons in Gaza before the Oct. 7 attacks, he said.

Israel has placed a $400,000 bounty on Sinwar, according to leaflets dropped by the Israeli air force in Gaza last week. The same leaflet offered rewards for three other Hamas leaders, including Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s armed wing.

Investigation into killing of Israeli hostages by IDF reveals a string of errors and flaws
The military investigation concludes that the soldiers and senior commanders operating in the area were not informed of a building found two days before the incident on which the words 'Help, 3 hostages' and 'SOS' were painted

An investigation into the incident in which three Israeli hostages in Gaza who escaped Hamas captivity were shot dead by Israeli soldiers uncovers a string of errors and flaws in the operation of and coordination between IDF forces in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City.

The soldier who shot the three Israeli hostages Samer al-Talalka, Yotam Haim and Alon Shamriz confirmed that he saw them carrying a white cloth, but did not have time to "make sense" of the situation.

Other soldiers opened fire at Haim and killed him, in violation of an explicit order which, they say, they "did not fully understand," after their commander called on the hostage to emerge from the building he had run into.

The military investigation determined that the soldiers and senior commanders operating in the area were not aware of the possibility that hostages might be held there. They were likewise not informed of a building discovered in the area on which the words "Help, 3 hostages" and "SOS" were painted.

The force that operated in the Shujaiyeh suburb belongs to the IDF's Battalion 17. It consisted of cadets from a squad commanders' course in the IDF's Infantry School (Brigade 828), who were inducted into the army's Golani brigade six months prior.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the battalion entered the Gaza Strip after the war broke out, following pressure by the brigade commander to integrate them in combat missions.

The force was first sent to lie in ambush in a hen house that had previously been struck by the Israeli military and still contained dead animals. The battalion was subsequently returned to Israel after soldiers suffered vomiting and diarrhea.

In the following weeks, the battalion was stationed in an outpost near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, close to the Gaza border. According to soldiers' parents, they were mainly stationary at the site, in their armored vehicles.

Another source told Haaretz that the soldiers were supposed to return to the infantry school or to a location farther from the border, out of concern that they were in danger at their current location. The soldiers insisted on remaining in place and were backed by the brigade's commanders.

Two weeks before the hostages were shot, the army's Division 36 lead an extensive operation to take over the Shujaiyeh neighborhood. The operation included forces from the Golani and Kfir brigades, as well as armored forces.

On December 13, a day before the hostages were killed, drones identified a building in the area on which the hostage's pleas for help were scrawled. As far as is known, the command post dealing with hostages and missing persons, headed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Nitzan Alon, was not informed of this.

Commanders in the area marked the building as dangerous, possibly serving to lure soldiers into an attack. Commanders later said they had encountered a similar situation, presenting a piece of paper with the word "help" they claim was found at a tunnel entrance.

In that case, adjacent houses were searched, but no hostages were found, leading commanders to think it had been a trap. Military sources told Haaretz that such a document was found by soldiers in Brigade 188, but this information wasn't passed on to Nitzan Alon's headquarters either. The nearby tunnel was not searched, and it was not determined whether the notice was a trap.

The day after the building holding the hostages was identified, part of the Kfir brigade was moved elsewhere, as the army was preparing to complete the takeover of Shujaiyeh.

That evening, at 9:30 P.M., they were replaced by a force from Battalion 17, which was tasked with guarding a supply route. They stayed in an open area where the houses had been mostly demolished by the IDF, and those that remained intact houses were manned by soldiers.

At 9:00 on Friday morning, one of the soldiers went to the third floor of an adjacent building to observe the surrounding area. He was armed with a rifle with telescopic sights, meant to allow precise identification before firing. Other soldiers were staying in the building's second floor.

At 9:46, the soldier identified three figures he considered suspicious, emerging from a house 500 meters away. Between them was another building, making it difficult to target the soldiers.

The order of events that led to the hostages' killing

The soldier fired three rapid shots, killing al-Talalka and Shamriz and wounding Yotam Haim. He later testified that 'for a split second' he noticed that the three were not wearing shirts and were waving a white cloth, but he didn't understand that they were trying to give themselves up to the IDF.

Haim fell to the ground but managed to get up and enter another building, 20 meters from where the soldiers were, crying "help!" Meanwhile, the battalion commander ordered, by shouting and over the radio, for his soldiers to desist from firing.

The commander, who saw the two dead men, called on Haim to come out of the building. He again told the soldiers not to shoot the wounded man or approach him, in case it was an attempt to lure soldiers.

At 9:49, two soldiers noticed Haim moving and opened fire, in spite of their commander's order. The hostage was killed instantly. The investigation determined that the order to hold fire was heard clearly, but the soldiers claimed that they hadn't understood the order, thinking it was a temporary order, meant to enable them to listen and ensure there was no enemy fire in the area.

When the shooting stopped, Engineer Corps soldiers were summoned to ensure that the bodies were not booby-trapped. The battalion commander suspected that Haim was Israeli when he saw the body, and the three bodies were sent for examination, where their identities were determined.

An investigation by the force's brigade commander showed that information collected by Alon's headquarters about hostages in the area was unknown to the soldiers or to senior divisional commanders. One lesson from the incident is that such information must henceforth reach every single soldier.

It was further argued that soldiers were not sure about the rules of engagement, especially with regard to unarmed men, even though the IDF is operating in a densely populated area, calling on Hamas fighters to surrender.

Another lesson is that "more alertness to unarmed civilians is required, especially when carrying white flags or wearing partial clothing." One source told Haaretz that this was a puzzling conclusion, since hundreds of civilians and Hamas fighters had surrendered in the preceding days.

"It's unclear how the investigation says that there were no similar cases of surrender or that the forces did not know how to handle such cases," said the source.

A further conclusion is that "commanders at all levels should be aware that other hostages may free themselves and search for a way to link up with our forces." This too is problematic.

Ron Krivoi, who was held by Hamas, said after his release that he had temporarily escaped, and another hostage may also have escaped for a short while, so that IDF soldiers should have already been prepared for such an event.

IDF says it’s fighting in new areas as it nears end of ground offensive in north Gaza

IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said on Wednesday evening that the military had begun to battle terror operatives in the Gaza City neighborhoods of Daraj and Tuffah, where one of the last of Hamas’s northern Gaza battalions remains, indicating the military appears to be nearing the end of its ground offensive in the northern part of the Strip.

“We have moved to fighting in Daraj-Tuffah. Daraj-Tuffah is adjacent to Shejaiya, and it completes [our operations] in Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Shejaiya, and Daraj-Tuffah,” Hagari said in a press conference, nearly two months after the IDF began the ground offensive against Hamas, which initially focused on northern Gaza.

The IDF has said it has operational control over Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and several other areas of northern Gaza, as it works to dismantle Hamas’s battalions. The IDF has also indicated that it will take only several more days to complete operations in Shejaiya, where some of the fiercest fighting took place.

On Thursday morning, the IDF said it carried out airstrikes against some 230 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip over the past day, while heavy fighting continued in northern Gaza despite the army indicating operations there were wrapping up.

In Gaza City’s Jabaliya, a school where civilians had been sheltering was cleared out by troops of the 551st Brigade, who found several weapons belonging to Hamas operatives inside, the army said.

The IDF also said that in the Shati camp on the northern Gaza coast, the 14th Brigade spotted a group of Hamas operatives and called in an airstrike.

The strike in Shati comes weeks after the IDF said it had full control of the area, indicating the military is still battling smaller Hamas cells.

The IDF is still expected to remain in northern Gaza for a long period after the main offensive, to continue dismantling Hamas’s infrastructure, including the terror group’s tunnels and caches of weapons.

Soldiers also pressed gains in south Gaza, where much of the fighting is expected to shift to.

In Khan Younis, the IDF said troops of the 7th Armored Brigade identified a group of Hamas operatives inside a building and called in an airstrike. A rocket launcher in the area was also hit as it prepared to fire projectiles at Israel, the army said.

The Navy also carried out strikes overnight, hitting vessels used by Hamas’s naval forces, the IDF added.

On Wednesday, the head of IDF Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman said the military was at “another significant phase of the offensive, in new areas.”

“This offensive will continue and keep moving forward. It will continue with pressure against the enemy above ground and underground,” he said during a tour of the frontline in southern Gaza with the commander of the 98th Division, Brig. Gen. Dan Goldfus.

“We will continue to advance here and in additional areas in which we have not yet maneuvered,” Finkelman added.

Hagari in his Wednesday press conference described a Hamas tunnel network found hidden beneath Palestine Square in Gaza City, saying that “senior Hamas members managed the fighting on October 7 [from the area].”

“From this infrastructure, they were able to spread across Gaza. From the heart of Gaza City, senior Hamas officials were able to reach Shifa Hospital, leave there in an ambulance to travel south, and return to Shifa Hospital, enter the [tunnel] network, and go north to Rantisi Hospital,” he said.

Israel’s southern skies remained unusually quiet throughout Wednesday, without a single rocket attack from Gaza since 3:58 p.m. on Tuesday, a rare respite from the near-constant stream of sirens triggered by projectile fire from the Strip.

The 40-hour lull ended with a rocket attack on the Gaza border community of Nirim on Thursday morning.

The period of calm came as Hamas’s leaders were in Egypt for talks revolving around a possible pause in the fighting and the release of hostages held by terror groups in the enclave.

Large fusillades of rockets which were fired regularly during the war’s early weeks have faded as Gazan terrorists have seemingly run low on ammunition and places to fire from as the Israeli military presses its ground offensive in the Strip, squeezing Hamas and its allies. On Wednesday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said mop-up operations were taking place in northern Gaza, indicating the army had essentially conquered half of the enclave.

Israel has continued pounding sites in Gaza, according to Palestinian reports, with a number of strikes reported in Rafah and elsewhere.

Hamas’s media office in the Gaza Strip said Wednesday afternoon that the death toll in Gaza since the start of the war had crossed 20,000.

The number cannot be independently confirmed, and it doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, whom an IDF spokesperson said earlier this month have been killed at a two-to-one ratio. Hamas’s toll also includes those killed in failed Palestinian rocket attacks.

Hamas says some 8,000 children and 6,200 women are among the dead. Hamas counts as children anyone below 18, while the IDF says many Hamas gunmen taking part in combat are minors in their late teens.

Israel says it is making an effort to avoid harm to civilians while fighting a terror group embedded within the civilian population. It has long accused Gaza-based terror groups of using Palestinians in the Strip as human shields, operating from sites, including schools and hospitals, which are supposed to be protected.

The war erupted when Hamas led some 3,000 terrorists in a devastating cross-border attack on October 7 that killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians. At least 240 people of all ages were kidnapped and taken as hostages.

Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at destroying Hamas, removing it from control over Gaza, and releasing the hostages.

A weeklong truce saw 105 hostages released until Hamas violated the terms of the ceasefire and fighting resumed. One of those released, a dual Russian-Israeli citizen, reportedly had managed to escape his guards but was eventually recaptured after spending four days trying to reach Israel.

Families of hostages have repeatedly voiced their concerns that Israel’s military campaign, which includes intense airstrikes, is endangering the lives of those in captivity. They have urged the government to seek freedom for the hostages via a broad deal with Hamas.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the IDF announced the deaths of five soldiers who were killed during the fighting, raising the number of troops who have died since the ground operation in Gaza to 137.

Master Sgt. (res.) Uriel Cohen, 33, a logistics commander in the Givati Brigade, from Tzur Hadassah; and Cpt. (res.) Lior Sivan, 32, from Beit Shemesh, an officer in the Harel Brigade’s 363 Battalion, were killed on Tuesday; and Sgt. Lavi Ghasi, 19, of the Nahal Brigade’s 931st Battalion, from Hashmonaim; Lt. Yaacov Elian, 20, a cadet in the Bahad 1 officers’ school’s Gefen Battalion, previously serving as a squad commander at the Givati Brigade’s training base, from Ramat Gan; and Lt. Omri Shwartz, 21, a cadet in the Bahad 1 officers’ school’s Gefen Battalion, previously serving in the Paratroopers Brigade’s reconnaissance unit, from Shadmot Dvora, were killed on Wednesday.

At least another nine soldiers were seriously wounded during fighting in Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the IDF.

Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years

The death toll reported in Gaza has reached roughly 20,000, according to officials in the territory, the heaviest loss on the Arab side in any war with Israel since the 1982 Lebanon invasion.

The number of Gaza residents reported killed during Israel’s 10-week-old war in the territory has already surpassed the toll for any other Arab conflict with Israel in more than 40 years and perhaps any since Israel’s founding in 1948.

The Gaza Health Ministry said on Wednesday that the death toll was close to 20,000, putting it above one of the most authoritative estimates of those killed in Lebanon by Israel’s 1982 invasion.

And though Gaza officials have said counting the dead has become increasingly challenging, most experts say the figure is likely an undercount and express shock at the enormity of the loss. Some military experts said more people had been killed more quickly in this war than during the deadliest stages of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Azmi Keshawi, the Gaza analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank, said this war was “more horrifying” than any he had experienced before. He said he and his family had fled his home in northern Gaza and moved six times so far. They now live in a tent near a U.N. shelter in the southern city of Rafah.

The Gaza Health Ministry has said that about 70 percent of those killed in the war are believed to be women and children.
The Israeli military has engaged in an intense air and ground campaign to eliminate Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that rules Gaza and led the Oct. 7 attack that officials say killed about 1,200 people in Israel, including hundreds of soldiers.

The high death toll reflects how Israel has chosen to wage the war, using thousands of airstrikes, heavy bombs and artillery in a small territory densely packed with civilians who cannot escape. Israel has said Hamas built an extensive tunnel network underground to shield its fighters and weapons, putting civilian infrastructure and people on the ground in the line of fire.

The Gaza war was already thought to be the deadliest conflict for Palestinians in the 75 years since Israel was established. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, an estimated 15,000 Palestinians were killed during the war surrounding Israel’s creation in 1948.

The deaths in the current conflict, if the figures from Gaza are accurate, have also exceeded the most widely cited estimate of the toll for the initial three months of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. But as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.

That estimate comes from an analysis of police and hospital records compiled in 1982 by the newspaper An Nahar, which at the time was among the Arab world’s most respected. It put the death toll at 17,825. But the paper said that tally was most likely an undercount, and in 1982, The Times reported that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible” in Lebanon.

In the 1967 Middle East war, nearly 19,000 Egyptians, Syrians and others were estimated to have been killed fighting Israel, while a similar number — mostly Syrians and Egyptians — died in the 1973 war, according to The Associated Press. As in the Gaza and Lebanon wars, the exact tolls for these wars are also not known, but most of the dead were believed to be combatants.

In contrast, the Gaza Health Ministry, which is part of the Hamas-run government there, said on Wednesday that of the 19,667 killed, about 70 percent are women and children. The Gazan authorities never give breakdowns for how many of those killed are combatants.

Israel claims it has killed some 7,000 Hamas fighters, but has not explained how it arrived at that number.

The toll in Gaza is expected to rise significantly when Palestinians are able to dig out of the vast destruction that the war has wrought. A Gazan government spokesman said Wednesday that in addition to the roughly 20,000 dead, 6,700 people are missing. Many are believed to still be buried in the rubble.

“The likelihood is that many people who are missing under the rubble will be determined to have been killed,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch. For that reason, the death toll is “likely to increase even if the bombing were to stop today,” he added.

People working to dig bodies out of rubble.

No independent organizations have been able to verify the Gaza death toll because of the difficulties of operating in the territory. And as the conflict has ground on, the casualty numbers have become more difficult to collect.

The Gaza Health Ministry compiles death toll data from the records of local hospitals and morgues, officials in the territory have said. But in recent weeks, the government media office said it had stepped in to help gather the figures after the Health Ministry’s facilities were bombed and 27 of the 36 hospitals in Gaza were rendered unusable by airstrikes amid an Israeli siege that has tightly restricted food, water, fuel and medicine from entering.

Frequent disruptions in communications caused by Israeli attacks on telecommunication towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communication lines and fuel shortages have also made gathering information very difficult.

Mahmoud al-Farra, a spokesman for the government media office, said the people collecting the data had to make the most of the “available possibilities” amid the fighting. “It’s hard to count them because the number of martyrs is large,” he added.

Throughout the war, the Gaza Health Ministry has released updated death tolls that have been called broadly reliable by the U.N., humanitarian groups and a study published this month in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

This month, when the ministry said the death toll had passed 15,000, some Israeli officials said they believed that figure to be roughly accurate. However, the Israeli military has also said the death toll reported in Gaza could not be trusted because the territory is run by Hamas.

On Oct. 26, the ministry released a list of the names and ID numbers of 6,747 people it said had been killed up to that point by Israeli bombing — an accounting that enhanced the credibility of its numbers.

The ministry’s staff includes many civil servants that predate the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, and humanitarian groups have defended its record. They say it has a history of good faith reporting and has provided reliable information.

But the ministry came under criticism after an Oct. 17 explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, when the government almost instantaneously released casualty figures that ranged from 500 to 833 dead. Days later, it announced a final count of 471.

After the explosion, John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, called the ministry “a front for Hamas,” and President Biden told reporters he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”

Mr. Biden then added: “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

The war has posed myriad other complications for compiling accurate casualty counts.

An estimated 85 percent of Gaza’s population of more than two million have fled their homes, after Israel ordered the evacuation of much of the territory, to try to escape Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion. Its largest population center, Gaza City, has been reduced to rubble. Thousands sleep on the street, and others live in overcrowded shelters that teem with disease.

There has been virtually no electricity for more than two months. Food and clean water are scarce. The U.N. says half the population is at risk of starvation, and 90 percent regularly go without food for a whole day.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a vocal critic of Hamas who grew up in Gaza but now lives in California, said Israeli airstrikes have so far killed more than 30 members of his family, including people in their 70s and cousins between the ages of 3 months and 9 years old.

Early in the war, he said, his childhood home was bombed, killing one young cousin. And last week, his aunt and uncle’s home was bombed, killing at least 31 people. Sitting in California, he watched video of their destroyed home on his phone. None of the people there were affiliated with Hamas, he said.

“It was a family home,” he said.

Iyad Abuheweila, Adam Sella and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

Iran’s paramilitary forces are providing real-time intelligence and weaponry, including drones and missiles, to Yemen’s Houthis that the rebels are using to target ships passing through the Red Sea, Western and regional security officials said.

Tracking information gathered by a Red Sea surveillance vessel controlled by Iran’s paramilitary forces is given to the Houthis, who have used it to attack commercial vessels passing through the Bab el-Mandeb strait in recent days, according to the officials.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon unveiled plans for a multinational naval force to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, many of the world’s biggest shipping lines, oil producers and other cargo owners have started diverting vessels from the region, prompting a rise in oil prices and insurance rates.

Many vessels sailing in the strait have been switching off their radios to avoid being tracked online, but an Iranian vessel stationed in the Red Sea is enabling the Houthi drones and missiles to accurately target the ships, the officials said.

The Iranian mission to the United Nations didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the Houthis said the group didn’t need to rely on Iran to help in its attacks. “It’s strange to attribute everything to Iran as if it were the world’s strongest power,” the spokesperson said. “We have intelligence facilities that have proven themselves over the years of aggression against us.”

The direct involvement by Iranian actors in the attacks raises the stakes for Israel and the U.S., which are eager to contain Tehran’s role in the region, and risks creating a new front in the conflict between Israel and its foes in the region, just as the U.S. is trying to stop it from escalating.

“The Houthis don’t have the radar technology to target the ships,” said a Western security official. “They need Iranian assistance. Without it, the missiles would just drop in the water.”

White House and Pentagon officials have demanded the Houthis cease attacks on commercial vessels and U.S. Navy ships. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have said privately they are looking at an offensive military response to the attacks.

Last week, the Houthis hit a Norwegian cargo vessel with an antiship cruise missile. The ship caught fire and was forced to sail to port after being damaged. None of the crew was injured.

On Friday, the White House declassified intelligence that it said showed the extent of the support Iran is providing to the Houthis for attacks in the Red Sea and on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The intelligence release appeared to be an effort to lay the groundwork for potential military action against the Houthis.

The White House said the U.S. had found the Houthis rely on monitoring and tactical intelligence from the Iranians to target vessels, and had provided Iranian-designed drones and missiles the Houthis launched toward Israel and at least one vessel in the Red Sea.

“Iranian support to these Houthi operations remains critical,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the White House’s National Security Council.

The U.S. has previously said Iran was enabling the Houthi attacks on ships but hadn’t said how until now. Iran for years has supplied weapons to the rebels in their battle against Saudi-backed foes in Yemen.

While the Houthis have said the attacks are in retaliation for Israel’s war in Gaza, the ships they have attacked have little or in some cases no links to Israel.

Washington has told Israel to let the U.S. military respond to the Houthis instead of taking action that could expand its conflict with Hamas and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia, U.S. and other government officials said.

U.S. officials have also said they wish to dissociate the attacks in the Red Sea from the conflict inside Gaza. Describing the Red Sea attacks as an international problem demanding a multilateral solution, the U.S. hopes to dissuade the Israelis from striking the Houthis and broadening their conflict with Hamas militants.

A senior Israeli official said the Iranian ship’s intelligence support for the Houthis shows that the West needs to pressure Tehran to halt its assistance, which is disrupting the global shipping trade. “Iran is giving them weapons, and Iran could stop it,” the Israeli official said. “We need to work to put pressure on Iran, so they will stop.”

In 2021, Israeli mines damaged an Iranian spy ship that had also been stationed in the Red Sea, and it was replaced by the vessel currently helping the Houthis, Western officials said.

Israel has also been angered by Houthi missile attacks targeting the southern port of Eilat, though they were intercepted by U.S. defenses.

U.S. officials say there is little indication that Iran is attempting to dissuade the Houthis from the attacks, though other officials acknowledge the group is a “wild card” and hard to control.

The intelligence the U.S. declassified and released on Friday purports to link Iran to the specific weaponry the Houthi militants used in recent attacks in the Red Sea and against Israel.

On Oct. 19, the Houthis launched from Yemen 29 KAS-04 OWAs drones from Yemen and at least three land-attack cruise missiles, the U.S. intelligence showed. Those weapons systems were designed by Iran, according to U.S. officials. Another Houthi attack against the commercial tanker M/V Central Park on Nov. 27 used the same kind of ballistic missiles Iran has supplied to the Houthis, U.S. officials said.

On Friday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned his country could retaliate against the threats coming out of Yemen. “If they continue to provoke us, try to attack Eilat with missiles or by other means, we will know what to do,” he said, speaking onboard a warship sailing near the Israeli port. “We are preparing. The troops here are ready for any mission and any command.”

Western security officials have previously said Iranian assistance to the Houthis is overseen by the Quds Force, a branch of Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Republic Guard Corps that operates autonomously from the civilian cabinet in Tehran. The U.S. has placed a $15 million bounty on the Quds Force commander in Yemen, Abdolreza Shahlaei, for his role in supplying weapons and explosives to Iraqi Shia groups and planning a 2007 attack in Iraq that killed five American soldiers and wounded three others.

In messages passed to the U.S. through Switzerland and in public, Iran has said it had no control over the actions of the Houthi and other forces in the Middle East that have attacked U.S. and Israeli targets in response to the war in Gaza.

A spokesman for the Iran mission at the United Nations said last week that Iran opposed a U.N. Security Council resolution that imposes an arms embargo only on the Houthis. He said Tehran has abided by its implementation and that the Yemenis were capable of military self-reliance.

Saleh al-Batati contributed to this article.

THE MASSACRE AT BE’ERI was not a single outburst of violence, over in a terrifying instant. It was a prolonged rampage, in which dozens of terrorists roamed freely through a pastoral village, killing methodically and with cruelty.

A 10-week New York Times investigation into what happened at Be’eri, based on interviews with scores of survivors and witnesses as well as on videos, text messages and recordings of phone calls, revealed a nightmare that lasted from just after dawn until well into the next day.

For a nation founded as a safe haven for Jews, the atrocities of Be’eri stand out as a defining trauma of the Oct. 7 attacks. An estimated 1,200 people died after Hamas and its allies surged across the border that day, provoking an Israeli campaign in Gaza that has killed roughly 20,000 people.

We interviewed more than 80 survivors, victims’ relatives, village leaders, soldiers and medics, and verified more than nine hours of security camera footage as well as phone and bodycam video shot by Gazans. We also reviewed more than 1,000 text messages and voice recordings, and used three-dimensional footage of Be’eri taken by Treedis, an Israeli software company, in the days after the massacre to reconstruct several sites where people were killed.

That allowed us to identify where most of the people at the kibbutz were killed. The loss of at least 97 civilians constituted almost one in every 10 people who lived in Be’eri, a community just east of Gaza that is roughly as small as Greenwich Village in New York City.

Hamas gunmen and their allies focused their attack on the western parts of the village, the area closest to Gaza. They ransacked those neighborhoods house by house, systematically setting fire to scores of homes, killing many of those they found inside and abducting others.

In the center of the village, the gunmen slaughtered most of the people hiding inside a besieged health clinic. On the eastern flank of Be’eri, another squad of attackers gathered 14 hostages inside a ransacked home and used them as human shields during a standoff with Israeli forces; some of the hostages were killed in the crossfire, during a delayed and chaotic military response.

Residents were shot in their bedrooms, on the sidewalk, and under trees, where they lay like rag dolls in a heap. Others were trapped in burning buildings, their bodies found charred beyond recognition. The oldest victim was 88, and the youngest was less than a year old.

If there was method to the assault, there was also randomness to it. Some residents who hid in bathrooms or shrubbery survived while many who sheltered in safe rooms were killed.

Spouses lost lifelong partners. Parents lost children. Children lost parents.

Hadar Bachar, a poised 13-year-old who had planned to spend the day at a village festival, was determined to save her father after he was shot.

From the safe room, she made a video call to the ambulance service, which it recorded and later shared with the family.

To show her father’s wounds to the dispatcher, Hadar panned around the room.

Her father, Avida Bachar, a 50-year-old farmer, was lying on the couch, unconscious but alive. His trousers were bloodied by bullets and grenade shrapnel.

Hoping to stem the bleeding, the dispatcher tried to tell Hadar how to make a tourniquet from a piece of clothing.

“No way I can,” she said. “I can’t even get up.”

She, too, was bleeding from the shrapnel of a grenade.

Surveillance footage shows the first Hamas militants emerging from the woods on the edge of Be’eri shortly after sunrise. There were two of them, clad in combat uniforms and carrying assault rifles. They crept cautiously toward the village entrance, one wearing a green Hamas bandanna and the other a back-to-front cap.

Many residents were already awake, jolted from sleep roughly 25 minutes earlier by an unusually intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. The rockets had been mostly intercepted by Israel’s air-defense system, and some villagers resumed their Saturday routines.

One man was out jogging. Several loaded their cars with bicycles, ready for a day in the countryside. A team of chefs had begun to prepare breakfast at the dining hall.

Nirit Hunwald, a nurse, was preparing to take her children to a village-wide treasure hunt.

Rinat Even, a social worker, was planning a family trip to see her siblings and parents in a nearby kibbutz.

Mr. Bachar was standing outside his home, gazing at the sky, wondering when the Israeli Air Force would respond to the rocket fire from Gaza.

Like most Israeli collective farms, or kibbutzim, Be’eri is a tightly knit community, sheltered from the outside world by a fence and a high yellow gate.

Residents often shared meals at a large communal dining hall and celebrated Jewish holidays together. Many left their doors unlocked and let their children play outside unsupervised until late at night.

They pooled their salaries into a central pot, which was then divided among the villagers. In addition to their farms, they ran an art gallery, a culture center and a large printworks.

The night before the attack, many residents had sipped wine and sung together in the village hall to mark the 77th anniversary of Be’eri.

The kibbutz was founded on the night of Oct. 5, 1946, one of 11 Jewish outposts established at the same time in an area largely populated by Arabs. In 1948, Arabs and Jews fought over the area during a war that forged the boundaries of the new state of Israel.

Egypt captured a sliver of nearby coastal land that became known as the Gaza Strip, and Be’eri became an Israeli border town, a short drive from Gaza’s eastern edge.

Israel occupied Gaza during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, withdrawing its troops in 2005 to allow Palestinians to run the territory. Hamas, an Islamist group opposed to Israel’s existence, seized power there in 2007, prompting Israel and Egypt to place Gaza under a crippling blockade.

Ever since, Be’eri has been on the frontline of several wars between Israel and Hamas. Whenever Hamas fired rockets from Gaza, families hurried into rocket-proof safe rooms, often a child’s bedroom.

Yet in a country that had shifted to the right, Be’eri was also known as a left-wing stronghold, filled with those who still believed in peace with the Palestinians. Some helped transport Gazans to and from medical treatment in Israel.

The yellow village gate embodied the sense of sanctuary that Be’eri offered its residents. It was a safe haven. Until that morning.

Using the butt of his rifle, one Hamas gunman smashed the window of the empty guardroom beside the gate.

He climbed inside. A second gunman hid in the trees.

Less than 20 seconds later, Benayahu Bitton, 22, approached Be’eri from the main road in a dark gray sedan, along with two friends.

The three had spent the night at a rave held roughly two miles away. Minutes earlier, Hamas gunmen had attacked the rave, and they fled.

Now, they were at the threshold of the nearest refuge they could find: the yellow gate of the Be’eri kibbutz.

The gate began to open.

Unseen by Mr. Bitton, the second gunman sneaked out from behind a tree, weapon raised, and fired into the car.

Mr. Bitton twisted in his seat, twitched, before slumping motionless.

The car rolled slowly through the open gate, coming to a halt 20 yards inside the village.

Mr. Bitton and his two friends were dead.

The massacre at Be’eri had begun.

The fear spread quickly in Be’eri, as scores of gunmen flowed into the village. The attackers almost immediately killed the head of the local emergency squad, a group of residents trained to help in moments of crisis.

Their leader dead, the surviving volunteers could not unlock the community storeroom where many of their guns were kept. Some of them were left unarmed.

They retreated to a dentist’s clinic, one of them shot and gravely wounded. Ms. Hunwald, the nurse, rushed through the streets to treat him.

On the village messaging app, residents repeatedly wondered why they had been left to fend for themselves.

The Israeli military had been overwhelmed by the scale of the Hamas attack. The main army headquarters in the area had been breached. Troops were ambushed on a main road, restricting access to almost all the affected kibbutzim, including Be’eri.

A small group of police officers managed to reach Be’eri at 7:37 a.m., driving an unmarked car. Security footage shows them parking near the entrance and dashing chaotically into the village.

While they were gone, a squad of gunmen arrived on motorbikes, rummaging through Mr. Bitton’s car. They also unsuccessfully attempted to steal the police officers’ jeep. When the police returned, nearly an hour later, they found some contents of Mr. Bitton’s car — clothes and a cooler — strewn across the sidewalk.

The body of one of Mr. Bitton’s slain friends was hanging limply from an open door.

Overwhelmed and outmanned, the police fled.

Once again, the village’s emergency squad was left to defend Be’eri alone.

Avida Bachar had lived in Be’eri all his life and managed the village farms, cultivating wheat, mangoes and avocados. His wife, Dana, 48, ran one of the village nursery schools, and was so skilled at caring for young children that some in the kibbutz called her a “baby whisperer.”

They had met as teenagers when Mr. Bachar was serving as a conscript in the navy, close to where Ms. Bachar was also doing mandatory service. They spent a year together in New York, where she worked as a nanny and he as a mover, before deciding to build a life together back in Be’eri.

They had raised their four children in a two-story home with beige walls on the western edge of the village, in the neighborhood closest to Gaza.

Carmel, 15, was an energetic teenager who loved surfing. Hadar was seen as mature for her age, an independent-minded young teenager who enjoyed baking and often helped her mother, Dana, at the nursery. Their elder brothers were away.

After news spread of the attack, the couple hurried with Hadar and Carmel into their safe room, a spare bedroom on the ground floor. Carmel grabbed several kitchen knives, in case he needed to defend his family.

The couple realized the militants had entered from the ring of the Austrian cowbell hanging on their front door.

“We hear them,” Dana Bachar wrote in a family WhatsApp group at 10:05 a.m.

As the Bachars hid in their safe room, groups of men were rampaging across the kibbutz — killing, looting and burning, surveillance video shows. Some were uniformed militants from Hamas. Others appeared to be civilians from Gaza who had followed in their wake. At least 120 men raided Be’eri that day, according to an Israeli commander who led the fight to retake the village, while village leaders put the number at over 200.

Scores arrived at the village’s side entrance, most in cars and one riding a horse-and-cart. At first, they heaved themselves over the 10-foot fence, one of them with a cigarette casually dangling from his lips.

Then one man kicked open a pedestrian gate, allowing the intruders to enter more easily. Young men, wearing T-shirts and jeans, sprinted inside. An elderly man with a white beard, leaning on two walking sticks, followed after them.

By now, a small group of Israeli special forces had arrived by helicopter. They tried to fight their way through the kibbutz, but were heavily outnumbered. One soldier was shot dead, and another was wounded by a gunshot to the chest, according to two members of the unit and a civilian who accompanied them.

By late morning, they had retreated to the main gate, where they tried to repel a new wave of attackers. Footage from the gate shows Israeli soldiers shooting at a car of militants, two of whom flee before the car catches fire.

The attackers were largely free to plunder, murder and kidnap.

Residents were rounded up and taken at gunpoint to the terrorists’ vehicles. Footage showed one squad of militants corralling barefoot residents along a village street, and another group leading an 85-year-old woman through a garden.

Gazans who roamed the kibbutz stole bicycles, a television, a golf buggy, even a tractor, video feeds reviewed by The Times showed.

Militants also made off with Mr. Bitton’s car, discarding his body in the street, security cameras show. Later, two men arrived in a jeep, picked up the body of one of Mr. Bitton’s passengers, and drove away with it.

For roughly four hours, the Bachar family hid in their safe room unnoticed. They silenced their phones and communicated with relatives by text and whispered voice notes. Unable to venture outside, they relieved themselves in a pot whenever they needed the bathroom.

By 11:23 a.m., a group of men was trying to break inside the safe room, according to messages sent by the family and their friends.

While safe rooms have reinforced walls designed to protect against rocket fire, they usually have no locks. They were never intended to keep out intruders.

So when the intruders tried to wrench the door open, Mr. Bachar could only grab its handle from the inside, struggling to keep the door shut.

That is when one of the attackers began firing at the door, piercing it.

One burst hit Carmel in the hand and abdomen.

A second burst struck Mr. Bachar’s legs.

Wounded and exhausted, Mr. Bachar fell back into the room, expecting the attackers to enter.

Instead, smoke began to seep under the door. The attackers had set their home on fire.

Desperate for air, the Bachars opened the window, which was protected by reinforced iron shutters. Minutes later, the attackers blasted open the shutters, throwing in grenades and firing on the family.

The grenades wounded Hadar and her father.

A few houses down the street, Rinat Even, the social worker, texted her final goodbyes to friends and relatives.

“I don’t see a way out of this,” Ms. Even, 44, wrote to her brothers.

“I don’t believe we will make it,” she wrote to a friend.

Ms. Even was sweltering with her family and their dog in their safe room.

Ms. Even had grown up nine miles away, in another farming village where her parents still live. She had moved to Be’eri in her 20s, initially working in the kindergarten, and eventually meeting Chen Even, a water engineer who later oversaw the irrigation of the village fields. They married in a modest ceremony beside the kibbutz swimming pool, and raised four sons, ages 8 to 16.

Now, their home was on fire, as was most of the neighborhood.

Outside, plumes of smoke were rising from several houses, turning the sky from bright blue to dark gray, security camera footage showed. The attackers burned dozens of homes in the village, in what appeared to be a systematic attempt to force residents to leave their safe rooms.

Families had to choose between being burned alive or shot to death.

One family of five waited until the magnets stuck to their safe room door began to melt. Then they jumped from a second-floor window, one child breaking his foot upon landing.

In another apartment in the same burning building, gunmen reached an 80-year-old retiree, Avlum Miles. In a call with his daughter at 1 p.m., he said they had removed the fingers on his left hand, without explaining how. He then began to drift in and out of consciousness.

“Dad, can you stay with me?” his daughter said, in a recording of the call provided to The Times. “I want you to stay with me.”

“I can’t hear anything,” Mr. Miles replied.

“I want you to stay with me the rest of my life, Dad,” his daughter said.

“Goodbye,” Mr. Miles said.

It was the last time she heard his voice.

At the Evens’ home, soot began to cover the walls of the house. Smoke filled their safe room. The heat rising, they stripped to their underwear.

“We must get out,” Ms. Even said in a text.

The parents and their sons prepared to die.

“No air,” Ms. Even wrote. “No rescue.”

In desperation, they opened a window and jumped. They left behind their dog, Marco, a Hungarian vizsla, fearing that he would attract attention.

With no other place to hide, the family lay down beneath a line of trees, according to photographs Ms. Even sent a friend.

After abandoning their clothes in the fire, the six of them were nearly naked.

As news spread that more soldiers had arrived, Ms. Even’s hopes rose.

“With God’s help it will end soon,” Ms. Even wrote a friend.

Until they ran out of ammunition, the volunteers from the emergency squad had slowed the attackers’ advance, fending them off for hours around the clinic. Two of them stood at the entrance to the clinic, opening fire on every gunman they saw.

Every few minutes the volunteers received another alert about another family in danger in Be’eri. Pinned down in the clinic, there was little they could do to respond.

“Everyone who leaves is shot,” Ms. Hunwald, 38, texted her wife.

The defense of the clinic had given Ms. Hunwald and two other medics time to treat some volunteers hurt in the raid. While one died, Ms. Hunwald and her team managed to save two — one hit in the back, and another hit in the pelvis.

Ms. Hunwald left a religious community to be with Einat Kornfeld, also 38, after they met as conscripts in the military. The couple moved to Be’eri five years ago, and had expected to spend the day playing and flying kites with their four children, ages 2 through 9.

Instead, Ms. Kornfeld was in the safe room with their children as attackers wandered near their home. After one child wet himself, the family lay for hours in a pool of urine.

Ms. Hunwald was crouched in a bathroom at the clinic, waiting for the gunmen to find her.


Another medic begged for mercy. The gunmen shot her dead.

Over the next few minutes, they killed three more people at the clinic, strafing its walls with gunfire.

One man survived after burrowing himself beneath a sink and pretending to be dead.

The gunmen didn’t check the bathroom where Ms. Hunwald hid.

3:25 p.m.:‘Take Them All to Gaza’

The couple had thought they were safe after fleeing the massacre at the nearby music festival. Instead, they found a village under lockdown, facing a similar attack.

The couple, Yasmin Porat, 44, and Tal Katz, 37, knocked on several doors, hoping to find a resident who might give them shelter.

No one dared open up — until they reached the home of Hadas Dagan, a yoga teacher living on the southeastern side of the village.

Ms. Dagan, 70, and her husband, Adi, 68, were left-wing Israelis who regularly drove Palestinian invalids to hospitals across Israel, most recently earlier that week. They hurried the ravers inside and made them coffee.

The two couples rested inside the Dagans’ safe room and spent the morning watching television reports about the music festival.

Roughly six hours later around 2 p.m., the terrorists reached the home, according to texts sent by Ms. Porat at the time.

They blasted open the Dagans’ safe room door with an explosive.

Captured by Hamas militants, the two couples were led to a nearby house.

Inside, they found 10 other hostages, surrounded by gunmen. Nine were seated around a dining table, including the 68-year-old owner of the house, Pesi Cohen; two of Ms. Cohen’s houseguests; as well as four retirees and 12-year-old twins who had been abducted from nearby homes.

One hostage stood nearby, a Palestinian minibus driver from East Jerusalem captured after he waited to collect people attending the music festival. Another of Ms. Cohen’s guests was dead, slumped on the floor.

Using the minibus driver as a translator, the captors explained that they intended to take the hostages back to Gaza.

The Israeli security forces were beginning to regain control of Be’eri, so they asked Ms. Porat to help them negotiate safe passage.

She set up a call between the Hamas commander and an Arabic-speaking police officer.

“Hello, God give you health,” the Hamas commander told the officer in Arabic, in a call recorded by the police and obtained by The Times.

“God give you health,” said the officer. “Who’s speaking with me? What’s your name?”

“God bless you, I’m from the Qassam brigades,” the commander replied, referring to Hamas’s military wing. “If you cause us any trouble, I’ll kill one of the hostages with me.”

“What’s the problem?” the officer asked. “Talk to me.”

“The problem is that I want to take them all to Gaza,” the commander replied.

“If you shoot us,” he said, “I’ll kill one of them.”

4 p.m.:A General’s Dilemma
With the military in disarray, Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram had suddenly been placed in charge of the Israeli effort to take back Be’eri and the surrounding area.

General Hiram was considered a rising star in the military. He lost an eye during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, and was set to take charge of the army’s Gaza division next year. His division operated in northern Israel and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where General Hiram also lived.

He reached Be’eri around 4 p.m. to find a disorganized hodgepodge of Israeli units fighting in different parts of the village.

One group of special forces was focused on advancing through the western part of Be’eri, while another was assigned the eastern flank. Surveillance footage showed soldiers recapturing the village dining hall, fanning out across a parking lot, and evacuating wounded residents through the same side gate that attackers, hours earlier, had used to breach the village.

A single tank was just arriving.

And a complicated situation was developing at Pesi Cohen’s house, where the 14 hostages were being held.

To slow the soldiers’ advance, the captors had forced roughly half of the hostages, including the Dagans, into Ms. Cohen’s backyard. They positioned the hostages between the troops and the house, according to Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat.

Expecting crossfire, the Dagans lay down beside the wall of the house, Ms. Dagan cradling her husband from behind.

Around 4 p.m., a police SWAT team and the gunmen began exchanging fire, both women recalled. The hostages in the backyard were trapped in the middle.

Hiding in the kitchen, the Hamas commander began taking off his clothes. Nearly naked, he held Ms. Porat and walked her out of the house, toward the SWAT team, prompting the officers to stop firing.

The Hamas fighter was surrendering, and Ms. Porat was his human shield.

After the two safely reached the police, the gunfire continued, on and off, for more than an hour.

During another lull, Ms. Dagan opened her eyes to see at least two hostages and a captor killed in the gunfire. It wasn’t clear who killed them, she said.

As the dusk approached, the SWAT commander and General Hiram began to argue. The SWAT commander thought more kidnappers might surrender. The general wanted the situation resolved by nightfall.

Minutes later, the militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade, according to the general and other witnesses who spoke to The Times.

“The negotiations are over,” General Hiram recalled telling the tank commander. “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.”

The tank fired two light shells at the house.

Shrapnel from the second shell hit Mr. Dagan in the neck, severing an artery and killing him, his wife said.

During the melee, the kidnappers were also killed.

Only two of the 14 hostages — Ms. Dagan and Ms. Porat — survived.

‘Wow, This Was a Massacre’

It was dark by the time Israeli troops finally reached the home of the Bachar family.

One soldier peered through the window of the Bachars’ safe room — the same window through which the gunmen had, hours earlier, thrown several grenades.

The soldier flashed the light fixed to the barrel of his gun.

The light fell on Hadar and her father, both still alive. Her mother and brother were dead.

“Wow, this was a massacre,” Mr. Bachar remembered the soldier saying. His leg was later amputated.

Ms. Hunwald, the nurse who hid in the clinic bathroom, was reunited with her family around the same time.

As they awaited a bus to take them to safety, rockets flying overhead, the family watched a steady stream of survivors emerge from Be’eri. Some were covered in ash and many were in tears, Ms. Hunwald recalled.

“We’re sitting there helplessly, hugging and crying, still thinking about who might be alive and who might be dead,” Ms. Hunwald said.

It would be another day before the soldiers regained full control over the neighborhood.

By then, bodies lay strewn on sidewalks across the village. More than 120 homes stood smoldering or in ruins. Scores of cars had been burned to ashen husks. Two first responders said they found a dead woman tied to a tree, naked.

At least 25 people had been abducted to Gaza.

As the sun set, a soldier spotted and photographed several half-naked bodies lying under a line of trees.

There were four of them: a woman, a man and two teenage boys — all curled into a fetal position.

Six soldiers stared at their bodies in silence.

It was the Evens and their two eldest sons.

They had all been shot dead.